2010 Call for Proposals for NERSC Resources

The Office of Science of the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) solicits proposals for allocations of high performance computing resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Proposals must support the mission of the Office of Science.

All current 2009 NERSC projects (including startup projects) must be renewed for 2010 in order to continue using NERSC.

The deadline for submitting 2010 NERSC proposals is Wednesday, September 23, 2009, 11:59 PM Pacific Time.

Award decisions for requests submitted before this deadline will be emailed to Principal Investigators and PI Proxies on December 14. Production requests made after September 23 will be reviewed in late January 2010. New startup requests awarded after August 2009 may be renewed for 2010 after the September 23 deadline.

2010 allocations will be for period January 12, 2010, through January 10, 2011.

Requests to use NERSC resources are submitted via a web form known as the ERCAP (Energy Research Computing Allocations Process) Request Form. ERCAP is accessed through the NERSC Information Management (NIM) system at http://nim.nersc.gov/.

In addition, requests to use the NERSC's Parallel Distributed Systems Facility (PDSF) and to renew PDSF projects are part of the ERCAP Form. PDSF allocations, however, are handled separately from ERCAP. Use of the PDSF is restricted to researchers in the high energy physics and nuclear science communities and must be pre-approved.

For more information on ERCAP see the NERSC Allocations Page.

If you are renewing your project you must also validate your user list: review and if necessary correct contact and other information for each active user. See: User List Validations.

• What's New for 2010?
• Eligibility
• New Principal Investigators
• Accessing the ERCAP Request Form
• Designating proxies to fill out the Request Form
• Help

What's New for 2010?

1. You now have the ability to upload PDFs to your request form in the following sections:
   • Project Description
   • Performance and Scaling Information
   • Accomplishments
   There are still text boxes for:
   • Project Overview
   • Accomplishments Overview
   These should be short and succinct. PLEASE EDIT your Project Overview so that it is understandable to the larger NERSC user community. We intend to publish these on the Awarded Projects page next year.
2. 224 million MPP (Cray XT4-equivalent) hours will be awarded to DOE production projects in AY 2010. This is a 40 percent increase over last year. The following MPP resources will be available:
   • Franklin, our Cray XT4 system with 38,288 computational cores
   • A new Linux cluster that will replace Bassi, Jacquard and DaVinci
   • A Cray XT5 system with about 5,300 computational cores
3. The INCITE and SC Director award types have been discontinued. If you had either of these awards in 2009 please renew with a project class of DOE Base or SciDAC and an allocation type of DOE Production.
4. PDSF projects are being asked new questions in the PDSF section. They should describe their code(s) in the Code Description section.
5. The Code Description and Data/Networking sections have been shortened and reformatted for better clarity.

Eligibility

NERSC supports research that reflects the mission of DOE's Office of Science. All Principal Investigators funded by the Office of Science may apply for an allocation of NERSC resources. In addition, researchers who aren't directly funded by DOE SC but with projects that are relevant to its mission may also apply to use NERSC resources. Up to seven percent of NERSC's resources may be awarded to relevant projects that aren't directly funded by the Office of Science.

New Principal Investigators

New PIs (who do not have a NERSC login name) must fill out the ERCAP Access Request web form. They must also fill out and fax back NERSC's Computer Use Policies Form. Once this is done the Account Support group will notify the new PI of their NIM login name and password.

Accessing the ERCAP Request Form

The ERCAP request form is accessed from NIM at http://nim.nersc.gov. You log into NIM using your NERSC login name and password. If you have forgotten your NERSC password please contact the Account Support Office at 1-800-66-NERSC menu option 2, or 1-510-486-8612.

After you have logged into NIM select My ERCAP Requests from the My Stuff pull-down list in the NIM main menu.

The questions on the request form are divided into several sections. Each section is grouped under a tab. When you first renew a previous year's request, or when you first create a new request, you will be in the first tab, called Project Overview. The other tabs are not clickable until you have saved the Project Overview; after which you can click on any tab in any order.

You MUST click the "Save" button at the bottom of each section in order to save your work in that section before selecting another tab.

Note that some of the questions on the Request Form have an (for information) icon associated with then; you can click this icon to get more detailed instructions for that question.

For more help see Help for the ERCAP Allocations Request Form.

Designating proxies to fill out the Request Form

Principal Investigators can designate one or more "PI Proxies" who write the request form for the PI (or in conjunction with the PI). See ERCAP Authorizations.

Help

If you need help filling out a request form please contact a NERSC consultant at 1-800-66-NERSC menu option 3, 1-510-486-8611, or consult@nersc.gov. If you have forgotten your NERSC password please call the Account Support Office at 1-800-66-NERSC menu option 2, or 1-510-486-8612.