The PRACE DECI program provides cross-national access to European Tier-1 HPC resources (national systems). Access will be awarded for a period of 12 months, beginning 1 June 2020. Resources are available on the following architectures: HP Cray XC40 / SHASTA, Intel and AMD clusters (various processor and memory configurations) and hybrid systems (clusters with GPGPU accelerators or Xeon Phi Co-processors (KNC)) made available from Czech Republic, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, and the UK. For this call additional resources are available from the Fenix Research Infrastructure, funded by the European ICEI project (https://fenix-ri.eu/). Applicants need not specify a particular machine or architecture, but if they do, we will endeavour to take these preferences into account.

• Opening date: 16 December 2019, 12:00 UTC
• Closing date: 31 January 2020, 17:00 UTC
• Anticipated allocation decisions: May 2020
• Allocation start: 1 June 2020
• Allocation period: 1 year for Project Access
• Type of access: DECI (Tier-1)

What is DECI?

The Distributed European Computing Initiative (DECI) is designed for projects requiring access to Tier-1 resources not currently available in the PI’s own country or for international collaborations. These projects do not require resources on the very largest (Tier-0) European Supercomputers or very large allocations of CPU.
DECI is a resource exchange program where resources are provided by a subset of PRACE members and awarded via the juste retour principle. This means that projects from each contributing country will in total receive at least 70% of the amount of resources contributed to DECI by the PI’s own country but will be allocated to a machine with an architecture and set up which best matches the needs of that project. The remaining time (up to 30%) is reserved for projects from countries which are not providing resources to the call. Individual projects are limited to around 5 million machine hours (average award per project expected to be around 2.5 million machine hours).

Scope of the Tier-1 call and criteria for access
DECI enables European researchers to obtain access to the most powerful national (Tier-1) computing resources in Europe regardless of their country of origin or employment and to enhance the impact of European science and technology at the highest level. Proposals must deal with complex, demanding, innovative simulations that would not be possible without Tier-1 access. Please note that, for the DECI-16 call, in addition to offering access to computing resources, applications-enabling and porting assistance from experts at the leading European HPC centers is offered (on request and depending on availability) to enable projects to be run on the most appropriate Tier-1 platforms in PRACE. However, these efforts are limited and will be decided upon on case by case basis.

Eligibility for Tier-1
Proposals from academia and industry are eligible, as long as the project leader is undertaking non-proprietary research in a European country (European Union, candidates, associated countries and PRACE member countries). Project leaders will typically be employed in research organizations (academic or industrial). Individual HPC centers may have further restrictions on who is eligible to use the machines, e.g. due to US export rules. Further information is available on request.

Tier-1 Computing Resources offered in this call
Cray: Around 30% of the DECI computing resources are available HP Cray XC40 / SHASTA systems.
Clusters: Around 70% of the DECI computing resources are available on Intel clusters (various processor and memory configurations), AMD clusters and hybrid systems (clusters with GPGPU accelerators or Xeon Phi Co-processors (KNC)).

ICEI resources offered in this call
ICEI resources include:
• Interactive computing services
• Virtual Machine services
• Archival data repository
• Active data repository

The amount of resources available together with the minimum request limit is available at this link (note these are not the main DECI Cray and Cluster resources provided by the countries listed above, this link is just for the additional ICEI resources). With respect to the maximum request applicants are encouraged not to exceed 20% of the available resources.
Applicants may apply for the present resources in addition to resources offered on Tier-1 systems that mainly target large scalable computing services. Applicants are hence encouraged to apply for multiple services offered by the present call (interactive computing, and data) and make their case for the need of these complementary services.

How to apply to DECI-16
Applicants should apply to DECI via our submission tool here https://deci-peer-review.cines.fr/. The DECI support team is available to answer questions by email while the call is open and applicants are encouraged to contact us if they have any questions. Late applications cannot be accepted. In the case of technical difficulties, the decision of the DECI Peer Review Team as to whether an application can be accepted is final. Applicants are advised to submit as early as possible before the deadline. The deadline for submission of proposals for Tier-1 systems is 31 January 2020, at 17:00 UTC.

For any queries related to applications or eligibility please contact: deci-support (at) prace-ri.eu

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