If you wish to submit a small project you need to provide the following documents (in PDF format):

• Your  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

There is no fixed deadline; small project proposals may be submitted at any time as long as the call is open. The 2026 Call for Small Project Proposals will open on January 2, 2026.

Small projects are intended for applicants from the Swiss user community who do not currently have compute resources at CSCS. Each Principal Investigator (PI) and their research group may submit only one such project proposal per year. Small allocations are subject to resource availability. Proposers must hold at least a postdoctoral position at an academic institution.

PhD students cannot apply independently and must submit proposals in consultation with, and under the auspices of, their supervisor. In such cases, the supervisor must be identified as the Principal Investigator (PI) of the project.

Proposers whose project proposals are approved must hold an academic position for the full duration of the project. CSCS reserves the right to terminate the project otherwise.

PIs or members of a PI’s research group who submit large production proposals are not eligible to apply for small production projects.

Small projects may request up to 8'000 node hours on Alps.

Such projects may not exceed the granted allocation and are limited to a one-year duration (allocations will be adjusted accordingly). Small projects are intended as an initial step, to be followed by the submission of a large proposal to the National and CHRONOS Tier-0 calls.

PIs or members of a PI’s research group who have ongoing large production projects (or are collaborators on a large proposal), or who already have access to CSCS compute resources, are not eligible to apply for small production projects.

A maximum of five accounts is allowed per small project.

Please note that resources for small production projects are not guaranteed.

Small production 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
  • Resource request (not to exceed the 10k 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 development project proposal  should be no longer than 5A4 pages including graphs and references, and must contain the following information:

• Brief statement of your goals
• Brief description of research method
• Outline of development
  • Current status of software, benchmarks and scaling
  • Algorithms and implementation (clear description of the algorithm development is required)
  • Programming and parallelization approach
  • Milestones
• Infrastructural requirements (type of hardware, debuggers, etc.)
• CV and Publication List (in pdf format)

The allocations of small development projects on other CSCS systems are discussed case by case. Small development projects can only ask for up to 5TB of storage.

Small production proposals (< 10'000 node hours)

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