Logo of Science Foundation Ireland  Logo of the Higher Education Authority, Ireland
Ireland's High-Performance Computing Centre | ICHEC
Home | News | Infrastructure | Services | Research | Support | Education & Training | Consultancy | About Us
Services
Full National Service
National Capability Service
Eligibility Criteria
Review Process
Institution-Specific Access
HPC Systems Outside Ireland
Visualisation
Video Conferencing
 

Access to HPC systems outside of Ireland

Overview

There will always be limits to the scale of HPC systems which are available locally to the research community. However in so far as possible this should not hinder the ambitions of researchers. A number of access programmes exist whereby Irish based researhers can gain access to very large scale HPC resources in the US and Europe. The systems in question represent some of the world's fastest machines.

To assist users in this area ICHEC is happy to discuss appropriate hardware and access programmes. On a number of such proposals ICHEC staff have acted as co-investigators, adding their HPC expierence to PI's scientific expertise to help create a multidisciplinary team which can effectively use such large scale resources.

It is ICHEC's policy to offer user support to its users when they are using external systems in much the same fashion as we do on our own systems, with obvious restrictions because ICHEC will not have administrative control of the systems. Liaising with the local administartion and support teams is a key part of this effort. A number of different access schemes are outlined below all of which ICHEC has experience of working with. If you have any questions do not hesitate to get in contact.


PRACE Production Access

PRACE the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe operates an access programme. Currently the only system available is the IBM Blue Gene/P JUGENE based in FZJ, Jülich in Germany. This machine has a total of 294,912 cores.

The current PRACE production call opened on June 15th and will close on August 15th. The allocation period will be 1 year begining on November 1st. The allocation period of the previous call was limited to 3 months. Full details of the call can be found here: http://www.prace-project.eu/hpc-access. Irish based reseachers who interested in applying are strongly encouraged to contact ICHEC to discuss their application.

Note: as of June 2010 the IBM Blue Gene /P system at FZJ is the 5th fastest system in the world in terms of the Top 500.


PRACE Prototype Access

PRACE also operates a Prototype Access scheme. The aim of this scheme is to permit rapid access to modest levels of resources on a varity of systems to aid porting and optimisation. The following list of available systems and their locations shows the variety of architectures represented.

  • Cray XT5/XTn AMD Opteron, Massively Parallel Processor (MPP), CSC-CSCS Finland & Switzerland
  • Bull et al. Intel Xeon Nehalem, Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) - Thin Nodes (TN), CEA-FZJ France & Germany
  • IBM Power 6, SMP Fat Nodes (FN), NCF/SARA Netherlands
  • IBM Cell, Hybrid (fine grain), BSC Spain
  • NEC Vector SX/9 & x86, Hybrid (course grain), HLRS Germany
  • Bull x86 & nVIDIA Tesla GPUs, Hybrid Cluster, CINES France
  • SGI ICE2/UV x86 Nehalem &s; Petapath/Clearspeed, Hybrid Cluster (TN, FN & accelerator cards), CINES-LRZ France & Germany
  • HP x86 & Petapath/Clearspeed, Hybrid Cluster (TN & accelerator cards), NCF/SARA Netherlands

The following conditions taken from the PRACE website apply:

  • Prototypes are intended for testing and not for standard production work.
  • As a general rule application support (e.g. code development, optimisation, parallelisation, etc.) during prototype testing is limited.
  • Prototype access is granted after technical review by the PRACE centre hosting the prototype.
  • The maximum project duration is 3 months.
  • Applicants must agree that applicants’ names and affiliations, as well as a summary of the project purpose and the results achieved during prototype testing, may be made publicly available in the PRACE website and may be used in PRACE deliverables and other PRACE documents.
  • Applicants must agree to summarise the results of the project in an end report to be sent to the PRACE centre hosting the prototype not later than 1 month after project conclusion.
  • The project leader is responsible for signing and fulfilling the usage agreements issued by the PRACE centre hosting the prototype.
  • Proposals are accessed by the PRACE Prototype Access Committee with representatives from the prototype host centre and representatives from PRACE WP5 and WP6.
  • Applicants have the right to reply to the granting decisions. Application replies will be handled by the PRACE Technical Board.

The call process has yet to settle into an extablished pattern but it is expected that there will be 3-4 calls per year. Details of some successful Irish applicationis can be found here. For more information on PRACE see http://www.prace-project.eu and http://www.prace-project.eu/prototype-access or contact us.


INCITE

INCITE is a US HPC access programme that is operated by the Department of Energy. It grants access to "leadership Computing Facilities" at both the Argonne and Oak Ridge National Labs.An annual call is made though applications can be for multi-year programmes. The 2011 call will allocate 1.6 billion compute hours. With the average award being in excess fo 20 million hours. This programme is open to applications from European researchers. More information can be found here.


Argonne Early Science Program

From time to time one-off programmes are run often corresponding to the commissioning of a new HPC system. The Argonne "Early Science Program" is one such programme it aims to get researchers using the next generation IBM Blue Gene being installed at Argonne National Lab in the US as early as possible. The system will be a 10 Petaflop machines with roughly 0.75 million cores. Roughly 2 billion compute hours were offered. While this call has now closed it was open to European researchers. More details can be found here.


DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative

DEISA the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications has operated an access programme called DECI, DEISA Extreme Computing Initiative. It operated since 2005, however the most recent call is due to be the final DECI call. ICHEC was involved in a number of submissions to this call and is pleased that some were successful despite the call being oversubscribed to an unprecedented level.

This initiative operated as follows:

  • There was a call for proposals each spring, e.g. March 1st to May 4th in 2009.
  • Proposals were evaluated by National Evaluation Committees. Their recommendations were considered by the DEISA executive council and final decisions are made in December. DECI proposals from Ireland were considered together with proposals from the UK.
  • Decisions were based on potential for innovation scientific merit and the relevance of the DEISA infrastructure.
  • Access to resources was given in defined time periods between November and the following October.

For more information see DEISA and DECI.

contact us | sitemap |