Call for Mahti Pilot Projects 2020!

CSC is installing the new Atos BullSequana XH2000 system Mahti, and the call for Pilot Projects to be run in the acceptance phase of the new system is now open.

The Pilot Projects are expected to produce results in a short time frame (approximately 4 weeks) beginning in mid-March, 2020. There will be a possibility to run very large jobs and even Grand Challenges if your project is ready for them.

We ask you to give an estimate how much resources your project would require (node-hours), and which would be the minimum amount that would produce useful results. However, no resource allocations will be awarded to the Pilot Projects since billing system will not be active in the acceptance phase, although the used resources will be monitored. Disk quotas will be active from the start. After the acceptance phase the projects will be awarded some resources to finish up the results but the Pilot Projects have a short and fixed life time.

The new system will consist of 1404 nodes each having 2 x 64 core AMD EPYC 7H12 processors running at 2.6 GHz and 256 GB of memory, with a total peak performance of 7.5 Pflops. More details on the technical specifications of the new environment can be found at https://research.csc.fi/techspecs. The selected Pilot Projects are expected to produce heavy load to the system during the acceptance phase. However, the availability and technical readiness of the system is not guaranteed and the software environment will be as is.

CSC will nominate a contact person and provide support to help the research group in porting and running the project in the new system. The accepted projects are supposed to report on their experiences, difficulties, successes, and expectations to help designing a permanent user environment for the new platform. In the beginning, we also expect a 1–2 slide presentation on your project, and finally a 1–2 slide presentation on the results of the project.

The proposals will be evaluated and selected by CSC's Scientific Customer Panel (https://research.csc.fi/scientific-customer-panel). The overall selection criteria are readiness and scientific potential (see also https://research.csc.fi/grand-challenge-proposals).

We would appreciate new approaches which have not been possible previously, ideally from all fields from natural sciences to humanities. In particular, we encourage the applicants to concretely bring up in their proposals why their research topic is a challenging, and if their project would succeed, then what would be the resulting breakthrough, and if the project has technical readiness and the abilities to run very large and scalable runs.

The deadline for proposals is Friday31st January, 2020, at 12:00.

The proposals are submitted via a web form: (https://link.webropolsurveys.com/S/F3B7E1580D47C567). You can save and edit your proposal until you decide to send it.

If you are interested in the call, we strongly advise you to contact us as soon as possible to enable the technical compatibility and applicability of your code and workflow.

More information from CSC Service Desk (servicedesk@csc.fi).