If you wish to submit a production project you need to have (in pdf format):

  • Your production project proposal including all the mandatory items listed below
  • Your curriculum vitae
  • Your list of publications 

The  portal for the proposal submission is : projectoffice.cscs.ch

The next deadline for submission of production proposals is on  Monday May 20, 2024 at 17 CEST for the allocation starting on October 1, 2024!

***Be aware that the submission portal closes at 17:00 CEST, after that you will no longer be able to submit a proposal!***

Who can apply?

Proposers must hold at least the position of post-doc within an academic institution. Only professors can apply for multi-year projects.

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 (and collaborations) will be accepted only if proposers and their teams are from academic institutions and use of GPUs is clearly proved and supported by all technical data. 

The same proposer cannot submit more than 2 proposals per Call.

Double-awarding is not allowed. Applicants have to submit original proposals that have not already been submitted and/or granted in any other HPC programs.

Resources

Principal investigators have to apply for resources on the hybrid Cray XC50. All mandatory items have to be performed on the GPU partition of Piz Daint. However, granted projects will be allocated on the HPC platform on Alps. Production project proposals, which need 1 Mio node hours or more, have to apply under the CHRONOS Tier-0 call. Please note that in the next CHRONOS call Piz Daint is no longer available.

If you do not have access to the hybrid partition please contact projectoffice(at)cscs.ch.

The production projects should involve highly parallel and scalable simulations. CSCS will give preference to projects that involve highly scalable codes and GPUs usage.

Please note that proposals using purely multicore codes (in other words, codes that cannot run on GPUs) will be granted preparatory access to Eiger@Alps. Such MC proposals can be granted only up to 500'000 node hours mostly on LUMI-C.

Swiss applicants can also request resources on the LUMI-C system in Kajaani, Finland. Please contact projectoffice@cscs.ch if you are interested in getting benchmark access on LUMI-C in preparation of a production proposal. LUMI-C has 2 x 64 cores AMD EPYC 7662 2.45 GHz. Please apply only if you have codes that do not run on GPUs.

***Please note that the multicore availability at CSCS is still relatively small compared to the accelerated resources and therefore applicants are strongly encouraged to move to GPU accelerated codes.***

Project Proposal Format

The project proposal must conform to these requirements:

  • Length: no longer than10 A4 pages including graphs and references
  • Font:  Arial or Times New Roman and font size 11 using single line spacing
  • Margins: at least 2.54 cm in all directions. These requirements apply to all sections of the proposal

And it must contain the following information:

  • Abstract
  • Background and significance
  • Scientific goals and objectives
  • Description of the research methods, algorithms, and code parallelization approach (including memory requirements)
  • Technical  Report:
    • Representative benchmarks and scaling
    • Resource justification (annual node hours and disk space)
  • Project plans: tasks and milestones
  • Visualization, pre- and post-processing needs
  • Previous results are mandatory! Please list allocations requested, granted and used in your previous project (if applicable). Research publications that resulted from these allocations acknowledging use of CSCS resources
  • Development and debugging requirements (not mandatory)

The project proposal should strictly follow the template and guidelines provided here

***Warning in the next call for proposals multi-year project proposals cannot be submitted due to the transition from Piz Daint to the Alps infrastructure***

Multi-year Submissions (Not applicable in the next call):

  • Multi-year project proposals must have a research plan that justifies the multi-year request and 2 clearly defined milestones for each year requested. These milestones will be checked at time of each renewal.
  • Only professors can submit multi-year proposals up to three years.
  • Be aware that in the renewals, applicants can only ask up to 20% more than the original granted resources.

Please note that lack of any of the mandatory parts may result in rejection of the proposal.

The allocation requested must be per year, that is you need to provide the total number of node hours required for one year of your project.

The documents that need to be submitted are:

  • Project Proposal (pdf format)
  • Curriculum Vitae (pdf format)
  • Publication List (pdf format)

VERY IMPORTANT:  If you do not have representative benchmarks and data to justify the resource request you need to apply for a Preparatory Project, which allows you to port your code, to test it, and to collect all the information necessary for a Production Project Proposal.

Please do not submit one proposal for multiple projects. It is mandatory to submit one proposal per project, even if those projects are related via the same code or suites of codes. The same PI cannot submit more than 2 proposals per call.

Please be aware that proposals rejected in previous calls cannot be resubmitted!

Small Production Projects

These projects can only apply for resources up to 36'000 node hours

The project proposal should be no longer than 5A4 pages including graphs and references, and must contain the following information:

  • Short Abstract
  • Short scientific goals and objectives
  • Description of the research methods, algorithms, and code parallelization approach (including memory requirements)
  • Technical  Report:
    • Representative benchmarks and scaling
    • Resource request (not to exceed the 36k limit, to be justified)
  • Disk space request exceeding 5 TB needs to be justified
  • CV and Publication List (in pdf format)

Small projects are not reviewed scientifically but only technically by CSCS experts. Once they pass the technical assessment they might be granted.

Small production projects are for applicants of the Swiss user community who do not have any compute resources at CSCS. PIs and their research group can only submit ONE such project proposal per year! Additionally, such projects cannot use more than the granted allocation and can only have from 6-month to 1 year duration (allocations will be adapted accordingly). We expect a small project to be the initial step to prepare and be followed by the submission of a large proposal in the National and Tier-0 calls.

PIs or members of the PI's group with ongoing large production projects (or collaborating in one large proposal) or with access to CSCS HPC compute resources cannot apply for small production projects. PIs or members of the PIs' group submitting large production proposals cannot apply for small ones as well. Resources for the small production projects are not guaranteed!

We allow a max 5 accounts per small project.

Small production projects have to be submitted (together with the CV and the publication list all in pdf format) via the web portal projectoffice.cscs.ch in the "Small Project Submission" call. There is no deadline, they can be submitted at any time.

Review Process

Small production proposals (< 36'000 node hours)

  • Complete proposals will be assessed by technical evaluation. Technically reasonable proposals will be accepted within two months from submission

 Large production proposals (> 36'000 and < 1 Mio node hours)

The review process is structured as follows:

  • Complete proposals will be subjected to a technical feasibility assessment
  • Complete proposals will be subjected to scientific review which will be carried out by reviewers from an international pool
  • Based on the technical/scientific reviews a panel committee of scientific experts will rate the projects and make a final allocation recommendation

Applicants do not receive intermediate feedbacks, the communication will only happen within 2-3 weeks from the SAC meeting.

Deadlines

There are two allocation periods for Production Projects and Large Development Projects on CSCS HPC systems starting on: April 1st and October 1st.

Deadlines »

Renewal Reports

Please click here » for information on the renewal report.

Back to the page Allocation Schemes »