PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, has selected 35 projects that will share 91 million processor core hours awarded by the most recent DECI (Distributed European Computing Initiative) call. The consortia of European computational scientists whose projects were selected for funding will be given access to one of the 19 European national HPC services through a national HPC resource exchange initiative, operated by members of the PRACE association.
The successful projects will be led by researchers from 19 European countries with collaborators from the USA and Canada. The call was oversubscribed by more than a factor of 2.5. Due to the excellent quality of the proposals, the contributing partners increased the resources offered to the call by 11 per cent over the original commitment; however, this still meant that many good projects could not be granted resources.
Projects are given access to compute resources at one or more of Europe's national supercomputers. For the first time in seven years of DECI calls, national supercomputers in Poland, Bulgaria and Ireland, in addition to national supercomputers in Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden, are participating in the HPC resource exchange initiative. The increase in number of national HPC facilities means that it has been possible to provide 55 per cent more resources, on average, to each project as compared to the last DECI call.
Successful projects are chosen for their potential to achieve ground-breaking scientific results through the use of supercomputers. The DECI support team provides specialist applications support to adapt the scientific codes to the most appropriate architecture.
PRACE opened the DECI-8 call on 2 November 2011. The computing resources for this call are available from May 2012 to April 2013. The new call features additional Tier-1 systems with new computing architectures. Around 100 million core hours will be available to applicants. The call will close on 10 January 2012.
