Call for Pilot Grand Challenges 2019: Now looking for the first pilot users to Finland’s next supercomputer!

CSC will install a new Atos BullSequana X400 system and new data facilities in April, 2019. The call for Pilot Grand Challenges for projects to be run in the acceptance phase of the new system is now open.

The Pilot Grand Challenge projects are expected to produce results in a short time frame (approximately 6 weeks) beginning in May, 2019. There will be a possibility to run very large jobs since the system will be reserved to a limited number of users.

The new cluster will consist of some 30,000 Intel cores and 320 NVIDIA V100 GPUs for AI and other use. 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 (CPU, GPU, and/or I/O intensive, or a mixture of these) to the system during the acceptance phase. However, the availability and feasibility of the system will not be guaranteed and the software environment will be as is.

CSC will nominate a contact person and provide extensive support to help the research group in porting and running the project in the new system. The accepted projects are supposed to report back on their experiences, difficulties, successes, and expectations to help designing a permanent user environment for the new platform.

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), but a good span over different use cases is taken into account (i.e. suitability):

• Large-scale simulations
• Medium-size high-throughput simulations
• Data-intensive simulations
• Artificial intelligence

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 Grand Challenge, and if their project would succeed, then what would be the resulting breakthrough.

The deadline for proposals is Monday, 25th February, 2019, at 12:00.

The proposals are submitted via a web form: https://link.webropolsurveys.com/S/0A840F5E6B5094A1. 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.