2015 call for proposals for allocations on Blue Waters HPC system — Nov. 16 deadline

The Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation (GLCPC) has been allocated 3.5 million node hours (equivalent to approximately 50 million core hours) annually as part of the Blue Waters project. This allocation provides the GLCPC member institutions with an unprecedented 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 http://www.ncsa.illinois.edu/enabling/bluewaters. Given the unprecedented scale and innovative architecture of the Blue Waters system, we are seeking proposals that focus on its 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:

1. 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.
2. Multi-GLCPC-institutional projects addressing focused scientific projects. An example might be a Great Lakes Ecosystems Modeling initiative (Digital Great Lakes).
3. Proposals for applications well-suited for the Blue Waters system architecture.
4. Proposals from non-traditional and underserved communities.

The GLCPC Allocations Committee anticipates 3-8 projects/allocations annually; 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. We note 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 16, 2015. The proposal review process is expected to be complete by mid-February 2016. Allocations awarded through GLCPC will be available for use beginning April 1, 2016 and will expire one year from time of award. To make your allocation request, please submit a written proposal (see format below), not to exceed 5 pages (in PDF format) to https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=glcpc2015cfp. For more information, visit http://www.greatlakesconsortium.org/cfp.html.