Call for proposals: LUMI pilot user projects (Finland)

The pan-European flagship supercomputer LUMI will be opened for customer use during next summer. Read more about LUMI’s capabilities and partitions in this article. LUMI will be installed in two phases:

•    During the summer 2021, all partitions besides the LUMI-G platform will be installed, together with the Early Access Platform for preparing applications for LUMI-G.
•    At the end of 2021 LUMI-G will be integrated to the system and LUMI is in its final configuration.

The acceptance of both of these phases include a 20-day availability testing and pilot use period.
We now call for proposals for pilot projects. Each LUMI consortium country will select up to 2 projects for each phase. This call for the Finland’s pilot projects is organized by CSC, and it is open for researchers in Finnish higher education and research institutions, and enterprises.

The pilot projects will have the following profiles:

•    data-intensive computing, high-throughput computing, and high-performance data analytics (CPU-only) workloads for the phase 1

•    highly scalable GPU applications for the phase 2.

In the first phase pilots, we want to generate stress especially to the storage systems. In the second phase, which is only the LUMI-G, we want to keep the GPU partition under full load and demonstrate its scalability. The availability and technical readiness of the system (e.g. installed software) is not guaranteed and unexpected maintenance breaks may occur during the pilot period.

During the pilot use period, no accounting will take place, and the selected pilot users are allowed and expected to compute as much as they can. The selected pilot projects of the first phase are expected to start on July 12, 2021 and on December 27, 2021 for the second phase.

The same applicant can apply in both phases, minding that the project profiles are very different as described above. The different phase pilots are applied with separate applications.

The general principle in the selection is to favor cutting-edge research. The selected users/user groups are also expected to have the sufficient technical capability to be able to prepare for the pilot use (with support from CSC if needed) and execute the pilots right from the beginning of the piloting phase. The pilot users are expected to report findings and feedback about the system performance, performance variations, computing environment etc.

The pilot applications are assessed on the basis of the following criteria:

•    The applicant's technical capability and commitment to implement the project. Especially with the 2nd phase pilots the candidates are expected to start actively preparing for the pilot right after receiving the status.

•    Technical representativity of the project, i.e. impact on the purpose of the acceptance testing.

•    The scientific significance, breakthrough potential and impact of the described project.

The evaluation of the technical feasibility will be made by CSC. The scientific quality, breakthrough potential, and impact of proposals will be evaluated by CSC’s Scientific Customer Panel.

Contact persons will be appointed for the selected projects. CSC is prepared to provide consultation on application porting and optimization for especially the 2nd phase pilot projects. Furthermore, we will facilitate the selected pilot projects with common communication platforms and virtual hackathons.

The proposals are submitted via this web form. You can save and edit your proposal until you decide to send it. The deadline for proposals is February 28, 2021, at 16:00 (Finnish time). The selected users will be notified by the end of March 2021.

More information about Finland’s call for LUMI pilots can be inquired from CSC Service Desk (helpdesk@csc.fi).