Academic Flagship Programme

EuroHPC

The Call for Proposals for the EuroHPC competence centre Academic Flagship programme at the Irish Centre for High-End Computing has now closed. The goal of this programme is to enable the most ambitious and scientifically accomplished academic groups in Ireland migrate from the national Tier-1 system to EuroHPC Tier-0 supercomputers. The Academic Flagship programme will accelerate the preparedness of the Irish academic user communities to compete for petascale systems and beyond such as those offered by EuroHPC.

Programme Overview

The objective of the Academic Flagship programme is to increase the competitiveness of Irish academic groups when applying for large Tier-0 type resources internationally. This will be done by providing hands-on performance engineering assistance for researchers to scale up and optimize their application codes. Academic Flagship projects are two-year awards and will receive support from designated competence centre experts. PIs will be required to submit a bi-annual milestone report and undergo an end of year renewal review in year one.

Academic Flagship projects are expected to cover a wide variety of scientific domains that span experimental, computational, observational and data-intensive sciences. The programme activities will focus on code development and optimization including but not limited to scaling, benchmarking, workflow software development and profiling. Production runs are not allowed as part of the Academic Flagship programme. Awarded projects are expected to make competitive bids for Tier-0 resources for production runs.

By the end of the two year programme it is expected that Academic Flagship project PIs will lead or partner in applying for access to EuroHPC Tier-0 systems. In preparation for this, PIs will be required to submit a PRACE Preparatory Access application during year two of the project. This application will be prepared with support from the competence centre POC for the project. This solicitation is open to individual researchers, a team of researchers from the same institution, or multi-institutional teams across all Irish HEIs. Proposals that include international collaborators, in particular at other EuroHPC competence centres, are encouraged.

ICHEC’s EuroHPC Competence Centre Resources

Academic Flagship projects will have access to the following resources:

Staff Support: The chosen Academic Flagship projects will receive part-time support from designated competence centre experts. Note PIs should include request plans for work which will be done with support from ICHEC experts.
Computing and Storage Resources: Academic Flagship projects will be awarded compute time and storage space on Kay. The initial compute time awards are expected to range from 500,000-600,000 core-hours and will have access to a designated queue on Kay. Increased allocations for the second year will be based on the 6 month proposal review and consultation with the competence centre POC assigned to the project. Storage requirements will be accommodated in consultation with the competence centre POC.
Training and Performance Engineering Support: The EuroHPC Competence Centre at ICHEC will offer targeted training and performance engineering support for the Academic Flagship projects. Depending on the requirements of the projects, this training is likely to include a detailed introduction to the hardware and software stack and profiling tools, deep dives on specific hardware features, and may include customized tutorials.

How to apply?

The call for proposals has now closed. Please email eurohpcCC-AF-programme@ichec.ie for any queries.

Evaluation & Selection Process

All the applications submitted to the Academic Flagship programme are subject to a technical and scientific evaluation. This peer review process will be carried out by a Scientific Committee together with competence centre experts. The Scientific Committee will be composed of two national reviewers and one international reviewer in order to evaluate the scientific merit of the proposal and applicant track record. The technical review will evaluate the proposals on the following criteria:

The proposed science application should have a viable and appropriate campaign for this Academic Flagship Programme on the ICHEC resources.
The CPU time requested should be appropriate for the planned code development.
The application should adequately justify the choice of resources and software. The application may also outline the target European petascale and pre-exacale architectures. Scalability studies are encouraged as part of the application.
The PI's (co-PI's) relevant expertise and percentage effort to the project.

Once the reviewer's reports are received, the decision by the centre will communicated to the applicant on September 4th 2020.

The Academic Flagship Programme key dates

1st July 2020 Academic Flagship call for proposals opens
14th August 2020 at 20:00 IST call closes
4th September 2020 successful proposals notified
7th-14th September 2020 onboarding of new projects

Contact

Please email eurohpcCC-AF-programme@ichec.ie with any queries about the programme.