2008 Accelerated Scientific Discovery at NCAR

Deadline: May 21, 2008

This summer NCAR will commission one of the first IBM POWER6™ computers (named bluefire) for NCAR’s Computational and Information System Laboratory (CISL) user community. A large portion of bluefire is being reserved from September through November 2008 for Accelerated Scientific Discovery (ASD), the successor to the Breakthrough Science (BTS) initiative in 2007 for university and NCAR researchers in the atmospheric, oceanic, and related sciences. CISL anticipates allocating 3M GAUs (equivalent to 2.14M processor hours) for university, NCAR, and joint university/NCAR projects. ASD projects will end on November 30, 2008.

University selection process: Projects will be reviewed and selected by the CHAP. University researchers in the atmospheric, oceanic, and closely related sciences who have received and used a large allocation at NCAR or another supercomputing center are invited to apply. An active NSF award for the proposed research (or a natural extension of the research) is required. Only one submission per research group will be accepted. Joint university/NCAR requests (with PI’s from universities and NCAR) will be reviewed by CHAP. Additional projects will be solicited and selected by GEO Program Managers at NSF.

NCAR selection process: A small number of NCAR projects will be forwarded by the NCAR Laboratory Associate Directors to the NCAR Executive Committee, which will make the final selection.

All submissions must follow the ASD guidelines (including using the ASD Form) and be submitted by May 21, 2008.

A successful proposal will:

• Present an opportunity to study a challenging and important scientific problem in the atmospheric, oceanic, or closely related sciences using NCAR’s newest supercomputer, an IBM POWER6.

• Utilize codes that are production ready and able to be completed within the three month period (1 September – 30 November 2008). Selected projects must complete a benchmark of the production code on bluefire by August 8 showing the ability to efficiently use bluefire resources. CISL staff will be available to provide tuning guidance during June and July. Projects must begin their production runs no later than September 5. If a project is unable to meet these benchmark and production deadlines, their ASD allocation will be reduced to 20% of their original allocation. This will allow CISL to reallocate the resources.

• Utilize codes that can effectively use bluefire and efficiently scale up to hundreds of processors.

• Require a total of 300,000 or more GAUs on bluefire.

• Provide a short accomplishment report (including scientific publications) on research since 2003 using large computing allocations at NCAR and agree to provide a preliminary progress report (by March 1, 2009) and final accomplishment report (by September 1, 2009) to CISL (alloc@ucar.edu ) including publications resulting from computational experiments using ASD resources.

Please email your proposal (using the ASD Form) to alloc@ucar.edu as a PDF by May 21. Allocation and selection process questions may be directed to Ginger Caldwell, cal@ucar.edu or 303-497-1229. Technical questions should be addressed to asdtech@ucar.edu .