The NSF has approved an extension for the Blue Waters to continue operating until December 19, 2019. This extension provides an additional nine months of operation and the NCSA Blue Waters team has allocated to the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation (GLCPC) an additional 2.7 million node hours—equivalent to approximately 86 million core hours as part of the Blue Waters project.
This allocation provides the GLCPC member institutions with an opportunity to advance their programs in computation, data, and visualization intensive research and education. This Call For Proposals (CFP) describes the process for submitting a proposal to the GLCPC Allocations Committee for allocations on the Blue Waters system. Details on the Blue Waters system can be found at https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/blue-waters.
The GLCPC is seeking proposals that focus on the systems scale and unique capabilities. Thus, projects that could be completed on one of the other NSF sponsored systems as part of the current XSEDE program are not encouraged for GLCPC Blue Waters allocations.
The GLCPC is seeking innovative proposals that fall into four categories:
- Scaling studies: The scaling of codes which will operate efficiently on large numbers of parallel processors presents a number of challenges. Therefore, projects of particular interest include those that optimize and/or scale community codes to very large scales. Examples include scaling of multilevel parallel applications (MPI+OpenMP), accelerators (CUDA, OpenACC or OpenCL), I/O and data-intensive applications, or novel communication topologies.
- Multi-GLCPC-institutional projects addressing focused scientific projects. An example might be a Great Lakes Ecosystems Modeling initiative (Digital Great Lakes).
- Proposals for applications well-suited for the Blue Waters system architecture.
- Proposals from non-traditional and underserved communities.
The GLCPC Allocations Committee anticipates 3-8 projects/allocations; consequently, the smallest project is expected to be approximately 320,000 node hours (~5 million core hours), which is roughly the same as dedicated use of a 4-core, 1,280-node cluster. The GLCPC notes that applications at this scale will require development efforts as well as different phases, such as: tuning and development; some smaller runs; large "production runs"; and then post processing; but, all will be at scales beyond other available large resources.
GLCPC allocation proposals will be accepted through midnight EST November 30, 2018. The proposal review process is expected to be complete by December 15, 2018. Allocations awarded through GLCPC will be available for use beginning December 2018 and will expire on December 19, 2019. Users will have to transfer their data from Blue Waters back to their campuses by December 19, 2019. A data management plan describing data transfer off of Blue Waters is required.
To find out how to make an allocation request, and all other information, visit the GLCPC webpage.
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