Research IT

Call for Access to the European HPC Service (PRACE)

PRACE has recently announced its 15th Call for Proposals for Project Access. The current call provides access to various European Tier 0 systems from Bull, Cray, Lenovo and IBM. These comprise a mixture of standard x86, Knights Landing and GPU platforms. Joint submissions from academia and industry are particularly welcome.

Projects can involve single runs that scale on large numbers of cores (or accelerators) or analyses that require many runs on fewer cores (ensemble simulations). The deadline for submissions is 30th May 2017. Further details regarding the call can be found on the PRACE website.

Note that PRACE 2.0 (the second phase of the service) was recently launched and access to UK researchers is currently not affected by Brexit. The service comprises 5 hosting partners who provide access to machines and 17 general partners who contribute to the operational costs. Of the general partners, the UK makes the largest yearly financial contribution to PRACE and therefore the research councils (EPSRC, BBSRC, NERC) are keen to see a return on this investment.

5th SHAPE Call

SHAPE is a PRACE initiative that aims to promote HPC uptake in SMEs. Academics and SMEs can apply together through a joint project. As well as access to PRACE systems, projects benefit from contributed PRACE support through a number of person months of research software engineering effort (typically 1 to 6 months effort). It is strongly recommended that you contact the SHAPE team to discuss your proposal before submission. Further details regarding the call can be found on the SHAPE webpage.

If you have any queries about applying to PRACE, please contact Dr Lee Margetts, School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering who is also Vice-Chairman of the PRACE Industrial Advisory Committee.