PRACE demonstrates again its strong support for European high-impact science and innovation!
Increased demand for world-class HPC resources – more and larger projects – characterizes PRACE's 7th Regular Call for Proposals: The 6 PRACE systems were asked to provide close to 3 times the amount of available computing time. The list of awarded projects shows the extensive integration of PRACE in the European HPC ecosystem: 2 projects are linked to EU FP7 grants, 3 to ERC and Marie Curie grants, and a further 11 build on resources received through national programmes. The 7th Call also marked the start of the second year of the multi-year projects that were awarded under Call 5. Noteworthy is as well that 3 projects were awarded to researchers from industry and another 7 projects previously received support through PRACE Preparatory Access – a further confirmation that PRACE stimulates top-level science.
An unprecedented number of 118 projects from top-level researchers from academia and industry requested time on one of the PRACE systems. Due to the larger size of the projects the competition was fierce and only a total of 42 proposals could be awarded, including the renewal of 7 multi-year projects.
"As Chair of the Access Committee, I participated from start to finish in the rigorous but fair peer review process of PRACE. It is worth pointing out that the scientific selection and prioritization is performed before, and independently of the allocation of available resources. It is thus no surprise that even some excellent projects could not be supported since the resources requested largely outnumbered those available. I am anyway satisfied to confirm that we were able to award excellent scientific projects," said Prof. Claudio Zannoni. "It is clear that the scientific community as a whole needs more computational resources, especially more of the world-class quality that PRACE can provide," he added.
Two large projects are linked to an EU FP7 grant:
HiResClim: High Resolution Ensemble Climate Modeling, led by Prof. Francesco Doblas-Reyes, is linked to IS-ENES2, EMBRACE, SPECS, EUPORIAS, as well as EUCLEIA. This project receives over 50 million core hours and is expected to substantially contribute to raise the profile of the ENES (European Network for Earth System Modelling) community, in particular in the field of climate prediction, both at the European and international level.
LAIT - Light-harvesting in the time domain, led by Prof. Carlo Andrea Rozzi, is linked to the CRONOS Project (Modelling Ultrafast Dynamics in Materials) which aims by a collaboration between research teams and companies like Siemens or Solaronix SA to develop new theories on solar energy harvesting and ultra-fast and ultra-high density magnetic data storage. This proposal has been awarded by 20 million core hours.
The following proposals are linked to ERC or Marie Curie grants:
Physics of the Solar Chromosphere assessment:sophisticated radiation-magnetohydrodynamic simulations to interpret observations from the upcoming NASA SMEX mission led by Prof. Mats Carlsson, who is currently holding an ERC Advanced Grant for 2012-2016. Between 3 September 2013 and 2 September 2014 he will be able to use his awarded 34 million core hours on SuperMUC hosted by GCS @ LRZ, Germany.
PHOTOSYSTEM2 - Water oxidation by photosynthesis: dynamics and reactivity of the manganese cluster in the Photosystem II complex explored by Quantum Mechanics / Molecular Mechanics simulations, led by Prof. Leonardo Guidoni, who is currently holding an ERC IDEAS Grant for 2009-2014, entitled Electronic Structure of Chemical, Biochemical, and Biophysical Systems: Multiscale Approach with Electron Correlation. He receives 6.5 million core hours on CURIE fat nodes hosted by GENCI, France.
KinOncoMut: The effect of oncogenic mutations on the conformational free energy landscape of kinases, led by Prof Francesco Luigi Gervasio from University College London is supported by a FP7 Marie Curie fellowship. He has been awarded by 18 million core hours on MareNostrum.
3 proposals were awarded to researchers from industry through PRACE Open R&D Access:
NURESAFE, development of a Nuclear Reactor Safety simulation platform, led by Sylvain Reboux from ASCOMP GmbH (Switzerland). He has been awarded by 11 millions core hours on Hermit hosted by GCS@HLRS, Germany.
Turbomeca(France) led by Anthony Roux in collaboration with CERFACS on simulation of thermal environment of industrial combustors and comparison with experiments. He receives an allocation of 15 millions core hours on CURIE fat nodes.
DNS4RISC: Deterministic Numerical ground motion Simulations for RIsk hazard in Santiago de Chileled by Marco Stupazzini from Munich Ré (Germany) one of the largest worldwide insurance companies. This project is the result of a fruitful collaboration between the researchers and PRACE experts on optimising an Open Source code called SPEED has been granted by 40 millions core hours on FERMI.
Among the 7 proposals awarded by PRACE under the 5th Call with a multi-year allocation and that received an allocation for their second year, 2 are impacting both science and industry:
Atomistic modelling for electrophysiology: Dr Mounir Tarek from CNRS/University de Lorraine received an amount of 70 million core hours on SuperMUC hosted by GCS@LRZ, Germany and CURIE thin nodes hosted by GENCI, France. Together with his first allocation, this represents a cumulated 140 million core hours for driving very innovative leading-edge research in understanding the propagation of the nervous impulse to later design drugs to cure serious illnesses like Parkinson's disease.
Combustion applied to turbo-machineries: Dr Koen Hillewaert from Cenaero (Belgium) was granted a renewal of 12 million core hours on JUQUEEN hosted by GCS@JSC, Germany. Together with an initial allocation of 14.25 million core hours, this new grant will allow Cenaero to develop advanced numerical models applied to highly accurate and reliable large eddy simulations of turbo-machinery flows dealing with complex industrial geometries.
Further information about these and all other PRACE awarded projects can be found here: http://prace-ri.eu/PRACE-7th-Regular-Call
About PRACE
The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE) is an international non-profit association with its seat in Brussels. The PRACE Research Infrastructure provides a persistent world-class high performance computing service for scientists and researchers from academia and industry in Europe. The computer systems and their operations accessible through PRACE are provided by 4 PRACE members (BSC representing Spain, CINECA representing Italy, GCS representing Germany and GENCI representing France). The Implementation Phase of PRACE receives funding from the EU's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreements RI-261557, RI-283493 and RI-312763. For more information, see www.prace-ri.eu
PRACE
Marjolein Oorsprong