Research groups receiving an allocation as part of the 25th call can make use of the granted computing time resources on the three GCS HPC systems for a period of 12 months. The GCS supercomputers, which all are in the top 20 of the latest TOP500 list ranking the most powerful HPC systems in the world, collectively offer researchers a peak performance of more than 130 petaflops—the largest amount of HPC power in Europe by a significant margin.
In addition to gaining access to these world-class supercomputers, users will also benefit from the unique mentoring concept implemented by GCS. Every large-scale project is assigned a mentor who acts as a permanent point of contact and has a detailed understanding of the user’s project, its history, and resource consumption, as well as the project’s associated challenges. This practice has already been met with positive reactions from users at the three centres, and staff at the centres are motivated to further refine this successful collaboration between HPC centres and their users. While the users profit from a more efficient and personalized support structure for his or her project, the GCS centres benefit from more efficient use of their valuable HPC resources—a win-win situation for all parties involved.
“As HPC systems get ever more complex, we are more than pleased that our mentoring concept proves to be such an invaluable catalyst to the research activities tackled by our users,” explains Prof. Dr. Dr. Thomas Lippert of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), who in April was appointed the new Chairman of the GCS Board of Directors for the next two years. “Having a liaison available at GCS to help solve computing challenges in the researchers’ specific areas of study allows the user to focus on scientific discovery instead of dealing with technical challenges stemming from the complexity of modern HPC architectures and its respective user environments”.
The complete list of approved GCS Large Scale Projects (25th Call) can be found here.
About GCS Large-Scale Projects:
In accordance with the mission of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing, all scientists and researchers in Germany are eligible to apply for computing time on the petascale HPC systems of Germany’s leading supercomputing institution. Projects are classified as “large-scale” if they require more tif they require at least 100 Mcore-h on Hawk, 45,000 EFLOP on JUWELS, or 45 Mcore-h on SuperMUC-NG. These values correspond to 2% of the systems’ annual production in terms of estimated availability. Computing time on the GCS systems is allocated by the GCS Scientific Steering Committee to scientifically leading, ground-breaking projects which deal with complex, demanding, and innovative simulations that would not be possible without the GCS petascale infrastructure. The projects are evaluated via a strict peer-review process on the basis of the projects’ scientific and technical excellence.
The GCS Calls for Large-Scale Projects application procedure and criteria for decision are described in detail here.
About GCS:
The Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS) combines the three national supercomputing centres HLRS (High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart), JSC (Jülich Supercomputing Centre), and LRZ (Leibniz Supercomputing Centre, Garching near Munich) into Germany’s Tier-0/1 supercomputing institution. Together the three centres provide the largest and most powerful supercomputing infrastructure in all of Europe and serve a wide range of industrial and research activities across various disciplines. They also provide top-tier training and education for the national as well as the European High Performance Computing (HPC) community. GCS is the German member of PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), an international non-profit association consisting of 26 member countries, whose representative organizations create a pan-European supercomputing infrastructure, providing access to computing and data management resources and services for large-scale scientific and engineering applications at the highest performance level.
GCS is jointly funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the federal states of Baden-Württemberg, Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia. It has its headquarters in Berlin/Germany.
Source: GCS