Who can apply?

Proposers must hold at least the position of post-doc within an academic institution.

PhD students CANNOT apply on their own, but instead must do so in consultation with, and under the auspices of, their supervisor. In such cases the supervisor should be identified as the Principal Investigator (PI) of the project.

International applications will be accepted only if use of GPUs is clearly needed.

These projects are intended for users who need:

  • to port and test their codes before applying for a Production Project
  • to generate the technical report » (i.e. required benchmarks, perfomance analysis and resource justification) to be included in the Production Project Proposal

These projects consist of a limited and finite amount of compute resources. They are allocated for 3 months - a maximum extension of 3 months may be granted based on CSCS' evaluation of the request. PhD students CANNOT apply on their own, but instead must do so in consultation with, and under the auspices of, their supervisor. In such cases the supervisor should be identified as the Principal Investigator (PI) of the project.

Preparatory Projects are allocated a total of 1'000 node hours over 3 months on the Cray XC50 (hybrid CPU/GPU Piz Daint) or a corresponding allocation if you are interested in other clusters available for the User Lab.

For multicore preparatory access please read the information under the Production Project Page »

In the preparatory phase we only open up to 3 accounts. You only have 1 week after the expiring date to access and transfer your data, after that the project and the accounts within are closed.

Project description

Up to two A4 pages:

  • Short description of the research methods, algorithms, and code
  • Parallelization approach, memory requirements
  • Research goals to achieve at the end of the three months to be promoted to a Production Project
  • HPC Experience of the applicant (brief description of the HPC know-how of the PI and the group; need of support in compiling, porting, optimizing, etc.)

How to apply

Please, send your Preparatory Project in pdf format to: projectoffice(at)cscs.ch.

Review process and decision

Preparatory Projects will undergo a technical review by CSCS experts within one month of submission.

Back to the page Allocation Schemes »