September 26, 2016 - by CSCS
During the second call for proposals in 2016, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) received thirty-eight applications, with scientists applying for a total of 39.5 million node hours of computer time and 1.9 petabytes of memory. With only 12 million node hours available for this period, the demand for computer time was more than three times as high. Ultimately, 14.7 million node hours were allocated, shared among the fields of chemistry, materials science, life sciences, mechanics and engineering, and various branches of physics. Five per cent of the proposals submitted by the Scientific Advisory Committee were approved in full, sixty-five per cent received a reduced amount of computer time and twelve per cent went away empty-handed.
The two large-scale projects allocated 2 million node hours of computer time apiece stem from particle and quantum physics and were submitted by EPF Lausanne and the University of Cyprus. 1 million node hours went to a large-scale materials science project at the University of Basel. All the other proposals accepted received between 100,000 and 600,000 node hours.
In 2016 a total of 27.4 million node hours has thus been allocated to users during both calls for proposals, along with 19.6 million node hours for the extension of ongoing projects and about 2 million node hours for small production and development projects.