ALLOCATION PROGRAMS

National researchers who would like to access GCS’s world-class HPC resources can apply for computing time through different allocation programs. 

GCS Large-Scale Projects

Large-scale projects are characterised by projects that require a large amount of core hours over longer periods of time. Projects are currently classified as "large-scale", if they require at least 25,000 node-h on Hunter, (100 Mcore-h on Hawk up to the 33rd call), or 5,250 EFLOP on JUWELS Cluster, or 45 Mcore-h on SuperMUC-NG Phase 1, or 140,000 GPU hours on SuperMUC-NG Phase 2. These values correspond to 2% of the systems’ annual production in terms of estimated availability. 

Large-scale projects go through a competitive review and allocation process established by the GCS. A "Call for Large-Scale Projects" is published by the Gauss Centre twice a year. Dates for closure of calls are usually at the end of winter and at the end of summer of each year. (more)

GCS Regular Projects

Proposals requesting less than figures listed above are called GCS regular projects. The peer-review process is implemented at the national level, carried out by the steering committees or allocation committees of the three GCS centres HLRS, JSC, and LRZ, respectively.

Applications for GCS regular projects on Hunter and SuperMUC-NG Phase 1 and 2 can be submitted at any time (so-called rolling calls), applications for GCS regular projects on JUPITER and JUWELS can be submitted twice a year at the same time as GCS large-scale projects.

Criteria for Decision 

Applications for compute resources are evaluated only according to their scientific excellence.

  • The project must be scientifically challenging as well as in the societal interest.
  • Applicants need to specify clear scientific goals and verifiable milestones in their proposals.
  • Project implementation must be technically feasible on the available systems, and be in reasonable proportion to the performance of these systems.
  • The principal investigator must have a proven scientific track record, and he or she must be able to successfully accomplish the proposed tasks. Applicants must possess the specialized understanding for using high-end computing systems. Specifically, researchers need to prove that their application has thorough documentation of application performance on smaller computing systems or scaling studies. 
  • Users should take advantage of the features unique to high-performance computing as they implement their respective programs. This will be checked regularly during the course of the project.