EuroCC Ireland

Academic Flagship

Academic Flagship

Launched in July 2020 the Academic Flagship at EuroCC Ireland will enhance the preparedness of the Irish academic user communities to compete for petascale systems offered by EuroHPC. These systems are currently unavailable in Ireland.  There are currently seven Irish research projects in the Academic Flagship. 

 

Programme Overview

We are currently working with seven research projects to scale up and optimize their application codes.

Academic Flagship projects are two-year awards and receive support from designated competence centre experts. PIs are required to submit a bi-annual milestone report and undergo an end of year renewal review.

The Academic Flagship projects cover a wide variety of scientific domains which span experimental, computational, observational and data-intensive sciences. The programme activities are focused on code development and optimization including but not limited to scaling, benchmarking, workflow software development and profiling. Production runs are not allowed as part of the Academic Flagship programme. Awarded projects are expected to make competitive bids for Tier-0 resources for production runs. Academic Flagship project PIs are anticipated to lead or partner with ICHEC in applying for access to EuroHPC Tier-0 systems. In preparation for this, PIs will be required to submit a PRACE Preparatory Access application during the second year of their project. This application will be prepared with support from EuroCC Ireland.

Throughout the programme, Academic Flagship projects will have access to the following resources:

  • Staff Support: The chosen Academic Flagship projects will receive part-time support from designated competence centre experts. Note PIs should include request plans for work which will be done with support from ICHEC experts.
  • Computing and Storage Resources: Academic Flagship projects will be awarded compute time and storage space on Kay. The initial compute time awards are expected to range from 500,000-600,000 core-hours and will have access to a designated queue on Kay. Increased allocations for the second year will be based on the 6 month proposal review and consultation with the competence centre POC assigned to the project. Storage requirements will be accommodated in consultation with the competence centre POC.
  • Training and Performance Engineering Support: The EuroHPC Competence Centre at ICHEC will offer targeted training and performance engineering support for the Academic Flagship projects. Depending on the requirements of the projects, this training is likely to include a detailed introduction to the hardware and software stack and profiling tools, deep dives on specific hardware features, and may include customized tutorials.

Evaluation & Selection Process

All applications submitted to the Academic Flagship programme following a call for proposals issued on 1 July 2020, were subject to a technical and scientific evaluation. This peer review process was carried out by a Scientific Committee together with competence centre experts. The Scientific Committee was composed of two national reviewers and one international reviewer in order to evaluate the scientific merit of the proposal and applicant track record. The technical review evaluated the proposals against the following criteria:

  • The proposed science application needed to have a viable and appropriate campaign for this Academic Flagship Programme on the ICHEC resources.
  • The CPU time requested needed to be appropriate for the planned code development. 
  • The application needed to adequately justify the choice of resources and software. The application was also required to outline the target European petascale and pre-exacale architectures. Scalability studies were encouraged as part of the application.
  • The PI's (co-PI's) relevant expertise and percentage effort for the project was considered.

The decision of the evaluation was communicated to the applicant on September 4th 2020.

The Academic Flagship Programme Updates

1. EuroCC Academic Flagship Update 1 - Hunting for Massive Black Holes -Dr John Regan, NUI, Maynooth
2. EuroCC Academic Flagship - Update 2 Dr Lida Ansari, Tyndall National Institute, UCC

 

Contact

Please email goar.sanchez@ichec.ie with any queries about the programme.