Oct. 27, 2020 — The 21st Call for Proposals for PRACE Project Access received 63 eligible proposals, of which 51 were awarded, a total of 2.45 billion core hours. This brings the total number of Project Access projects awarded since 2010 to 830. Taking into account the three multi-year projects from the 19th Call, and the 13.3 million core hours reserved for Centres of Excellence, the total amount of computing time awarded by PRACE to date reaches approximately 28 billion core hours.

The proposals awarded under the 21st Call are led by principal investigators from 16 different countries. International collaboration features strongly in awarded proposals, with participating teams involving collaborators coming from a wide range of countries: from the USA and Australia to Kazakhstan and Ukraine. In addition to resources, three awarded proposals will receive additional support from High-Level Support Teams (HLSTs) and two proposals that were not successful in securing resources under the 21st Call will still receive additional support from HLSTs.

The newly awarded proposals represent six scientific domains: 9 proposals are linked to the fields of Biochemistry, Bioinformatics and Life Sciences; 7 to Chemical Sciences and Materials; 2 to Earth System Sciences; 17 to Engineering; 11 to Fundamental Constituents of Matter; and 5 to Universe Sciences.

The 21st Call for Proposals is the first call to include three systems that offer GPUs. In addition to Piz Daint at ETH Zurich/CSCS (Switzerland) and Marconi100 at CINECA (Italy), JUWELS Booster at GCS/JSC (Germany) also offers GPUs for this call. Overall, the resources allocated under the 21st Call in GPU-based systems exceed 1 billion core hours, surpassing the corresponding allocation in GPU-based systems under previous calls.

Four projects are awarded under the now established “Industry Access Track”, which was introduced as part of the 19th Call. The “Industry Access Track” earmarks 10% of the total resources for proposals with principal investigators from industry.

WIMPY – Wind Turbines Multi Physics was awarded 24.8 million core hours on Joliot-Curie Rome at GENCI/CEA (France). This project will be led by Dr. Bastien Duboc from Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy and aims at bringing new understanding of the flow around large wind turbines via high-fidelity Large-Eddy Simulations (LES).

OptoSpin – Towards realistic simulation of transition metal dichalcogenide opto-spintronic devices, led by Prof. Matthieu Verstraete (University of Liège, Belgium) was awarded 40 million core hours at MareNostrum at BSC (Spain). It aims to understand and control the key parameters involved in the design of next-generation opto-spintronics devices, by exploiting state-of-the-art first-principles methods and HPC resources.

Advancing charged particle minibeam radiation therapy (hMBRT), led by Dr. Yolanda Prezado (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France) was awarded 16.2 million core hours at Joliot-Curie SKL at GENCI/CEA (France) and investigates a new approach in overcoming current limitations in Radio Therapy through charged mini-beam radiation therapy.

EMGKPIC – Gyrokinetic PIC simulations of electromagnetic turbulence in tokamaks and stellarators, led by Dr. Oleksiy Mishchenko (Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, Germany) was awarded 200 million core hours at Marconi100 at CINECA (Italy) and 30 million core hours at Joliot-Curie SKL at GENCI/CEA (France), and focusses on using the ORB5 and EUTERPE codes to tackle the multiscale modelling of fusion plasmas, impacting the fusion performance of large, controlled fusion machines.

EPPS – High-Fidelity Plasma Simulation of Electric Propulsion Systems, led by Dr.Ing. Stephen Copplestone (Boltzplatz – Numerical Plasma Dynamics, Germany), was awarded 35 million core hours at Hawk at GCS/HLRS (Germany), and focusses on 3D multi-scale plasma flow simulations for developing new concepts for electric propulsion systems.

Local Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Assessment for HPC – TsuHazAP, led by Dr. Finn Løvholt (Norwegian Geotechnical Institute, Norway) was awarded 70 million core hours on Marconi100 at CINECA (Italy). It will employ Tsunami-HySEA GPU code for simulating tsunami propagation and inundation on nested topo-bathymetric grids, as well as local hazard aggregation, increasing accuracy on the tsunami hazard.

Combining Deep Learning and Language Modelling Techniques to improve prediction of bio-active peptides from natural sources, led by Mr. Hansel Gomez (NURITAS Ltd., Ireland) was awarded 68 million core hours and HLST support at Piz Daint at ETH Zurich/CSCS (Switzerland). The project aims at developing new Natural Language Processing-based machine learning models that incorporate more advanced and complex embedding techniques, to increase the predictive power of predictors and identify novel Bioactive peptides from natural sources.

The 21st PRACE Call for Proposals awarded resources to several principal investigators whose work is also supported by European funding through the following schemes: ERC Advanced Grant (3), ERC Starting Grant (3), ERC Consolidator Grant (2), and Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship (4). In addition, resources were also awarded to principal investigators involved in other Horizon 2020 (18) and EUROfusion (1) projects, as well as one COST action.

The 21st Call for Proposals for PRACE Project Access (Tier-0) was open from 3 March 2020 until 5 May 2020. Selected proposals will receive allocations to PRACE resources from 1 October 2020 to 30 September 2021. All information and the abstracts of the projects awarded under the 21st PRACE Call for Proposals is available on the PRACE website.

The 22nd Call for Proposals for PRACE Project Access (Tier-0) will be open from 01 September 2020 to 27 October 2020, 10:00 CET, see here: https://prace-ri.eu/call/prace-22nd-call-for-proposals-for-project-access/

ABOUT PRACE

The mission of PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) is to enable high-impact scientific discovery and engineering research and development across all disciplines to enhance European competitiveness for the benefit of society.

PRACE seeks to realise this mission by offering world class computing and data management resources and services through a peer review process.

PRACE aisbl is funded by the PRACE Members The Implementation Phase of PRACE receives funding from the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (2014-2020).

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Source: PRACE