ERCAP Introduction

You may use the Energy Research Computing Allocations Process (ERCAP) web interface to make new requests for NERSC resources at any time during the year.

For the 2005 allocation year (December 1, 2004 through November 30, 2005) the DOE Office of Science has solicited proposals for large allocations of computing resources at NERSC. See the 2005 Call for NERSC Allocation Requests.

ERCAP is expected to open for 2006 requests on Thursday, June 30. Please note that this year the DOE Office of Science (SC) is coordinating the Call for Proposals for all SC sites and they will set the opening date.

Note that the 2006 allocation year will last only ten months: from December 1, 2005, through September 30, 2006. Starting in 2007 NERSC will again use the DOE fiscal year for its allocation cycle.

Startup and Production Requests

Award decisions for Startup Requests are made by NERSC within one to three weeks after applying. Note, however, that Startup awards are currently on hold until about August, when we expect to place a new Linux cluster into service. This is because the IBM SP, Seaborg, is over-subscribed. Startup awards are valid for up to 18 months (although they need to be renewed for a new allocation year), after which time you must apply for a DOE production award. Production projects are expected to have codes that can effectively use hundreds to thousands of processors on Seaborg.
Award decisions for Production Requests are made by DOE within several weeks of applying. There is, however, very little production time (for most offices there is no time) to allocate for the remainder of the 2005 allocation year.

Requesting 2006 Resources

For the 2006 allocation year (December 1, 2005 through September 30, 2006) computational resources will be allocated in IBM SP Power3 equivalent hours. The units are called MPP hours. In 2006 MPP hours will be available on the following resources:

Seaborg, an IBM Power3 SP at NERSC with 6,080 computational processors.
Jacquard, an AMD Opteron Linux Cluster with 640 computational processors
DaVinci, an SGI Altix 350 cluster which will have 32 processors in 2006.

All three computational resources will share a common computational allocation.

For most production projects the minimum MPP request is 20,000 hours (exceptions can be made for computer science and applied math projects that only need resources for testing purposes). For startup projects, the maximum MPP request is 20,000 hours.

Storage resources will be allocated for HPSS, NERSC's Mass Storage System, in units called Storage Resource Units (SRUs).

All projects are awarded at least 10 SRUs. For Startup projects, the maximum SRU request is 5,000 SRUs.

In addition, requests to use the NERSC's Parallel Distributed Systems Facility (PDSF) are included on the ERCAP Form. PDSF awards, however, are handled separately from ERCAP. See Account Information for PDSF for eligibility. PDSF repos are renewed for the next fiscal year using the PDSF tab on the ERCAP request form.

Please read Introduction to NERSC Account Management. See especially the section on Allocation Management which explains how allocations to repositories with low usage are decremented at certain times during the year.