Computing Time Application for the GCS Petaflop Supercomputer JUGENE

The GCS/NIC-call is open for project leaders, whose affiliation is in Germany (or is a foreign office of a German institution). Also eligible are German scientists if they are working in an international organisation with signifikant German participation (e.g. CERN, ESA, ESO) and do not have a permanent position there. Interested researchers from abroad (within Europe) are invited to apply within the GCS/PRACE-call.

Project applications for JUGENE may be submitted by any scientist qualified in his or her respective field of research. Computing resources are allocated on the basis of independent referees' reports. Apart from the scientific relevance of the project, an important criterion for the allocation of computing resources is that the project can make reasonable use of the computer and use a large number of processors in parallel in the computations.

Please consider the following notes on the use of JUGENE:

JUGENE is a IBM Blue Gene/P system with 72 racks. Each rack consists of 1024 compute nodes; each compute node contains a Power-PC 450 processor with four cores and has 2 GB of memory. For an optimal use of resources each job should run on a whole number of racks. The minimal number for a communication-intensive job is two racks (8192 processor cores), otherwise one rack (4096 processor cores).

The resources of this leadership-class system will be provided for a small number of grand challenge projects that will be selected in accordance with strict scientific standards. Resources will be allocated to the projects within the framework of an international reviewing procedure. The following criteria must be met by the projects in order to be eligible:
  • Scientific excellence.
  • Clear scientific goals and verifiable milestones on the way to reach these goals.
  • Preliminary studies that demonstrate the scalability of the program to very high processor numbers and proof of very good scalability at least up to 4096 processor cores (contact Wolfgang Frings, email: w.frings@fz-juelich.de).
  • Well-founded and detailed demonstration of the required number of racks, the runtime of the program and the total required CPU time.
The smallest unit that can be requested is 1 rack month.

Large-scale projects (24 rack months or more) are peer-reviewed by a committee of the GCS. If approved they will get increased user support and preferential processing of their jobs.

Regular projects are peer-reviewed by a committee of the John von Neumann Institute for Computing (NIC).


Computing time periods are yearly - with the possibility of application twice per year - and will begin 1 May and 1 November each year. The next computing time period will begin 1 November 2011 and will end 31 October 2012.

The deadline for the next application is 29 February 2012, 17:00.

Scientists working outside of Germany, please apply via PRACE.

Please, first prepare a detailed project description that you will have to upload to the electronic questionnaire as a pdf file. Follow the guidelines about form, content and size of the project description. Take particular care that
  • the estimate of the applied computing time is verifiable by the reviewer,
  • a plot is supplied that shows the scalability of the program under realistic production conditions, and that
  • you provide information on computing projects and applications for computing time you have with other supercomputing centres.
If you wish to add supplemental material to the project description (unpublished manuscripts etc.), please collect that in a second pdf-file. Also this file you will have to upload to the electronic questionnaire.

Please fill in the electronic questionnnaire completely and attach the project description and - if necessary - the supplemental material as pdf files. Please make sure that your data are complete and check them. Finally, please print the application form and send a signed paper copy to the NIC coordination office at JSC.

Address:
NIC coordination office
Jülich Supercomputing Centre
Forschungszentrum Jülich
52425 Jülich
Germany