2008 Call for Proposals for NERSC Resources

The Office of Science of the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) solicits proposals for allocations of high performance computing resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Proposals must support the mission of the Office of Science.

The deadline for submitting 2008 NERSC proposals is Wednesday, October 24, 2007, 11:59 PM Pacific Time. Award decisions for requests submitted before this deadline will be emailed to Principal Investigators and PI Proxies on December 13. Requests made after October 24 will be reviewed in January.

2008 allocations will be for period January 8, 2008, through January 12, 2009.

Requests to use NERSC resources are submitted via a web form known as the ERCAP (Energy Research Computing Allocations Process) Request Form. ERCAP is accessed through the NERSC Information Management (NIM) system at http://nim.nersc.gov/.

In addition, requests to use the NERSC's Parallel Distributed Systems Facility (PDSF) and to renew PDSF projects are part of the ERCAP Form. PDSF allocations, however, are handled separately from ERCAP.

For more information on ERCAP see the Allocations Page.

• What's New for 2008?
• Eligibility
• New Principal Investigators
• Accessing the ERCAP Request Form
• Designating proxies to fill out the Request Form
• Help

What's New for 2008?

1. The Cray XT4 Franklin will be in production. It has 19,344 computational cores and a machine charge factor of 6.5.
2. Several of the questions on the ERCAP request form have been refined so that you can provide more comprehensive information about your code algorithms and your data analysis and storage requirements.
3. Resource amounts for startup requests have increased to 50,000 POWER3-equivalent hours and 10,000 Storage Resource Units.

Eligibility

NERSC supports research that reflects the mission of DOE's Office of Science. All Principal Investigators funded by the Office of Science may apply for an allocation of NERSC resources. In addition, researchers who aren't directly funded by DOE SC but with projects that are relevant to its mission may also apply to use NERSC resources. Up to seven percent of NERSC's resources may be awarded to relevant projects that aren't directly funded by the Office of Science.

New Principal Investigators

New PIs (who do not have a NERSC login name) must fill out the ERCAP Access Request web form. They must also fill out and fax back NERSC's Computer Use Policies Form. Once this is done the Account Support group will notify the new PI of their NIM login name and password.

Accessing the ERCAP Request Form

The ERCAP request form is accessed from NIM at http://nim.nersc.gov. You log into NIM using your NERSC login name and your NIM password. If you have forgotten your NIM password please contact the Account Support Office at 1-800-66-NERSC menu option 2, or 1-510-486-8612.

After you have logged into NIM select My ERCAP Requests from the My Stuff pull-down list in the NIM main menu.

The questions on the 2007 request form are divided into several sections. Each section is grouped under a tab. When you first renew a previous year's request, or when you first create a new request, you will be in the first tab, called Project Overview. The other tabs are not clickable until you have saved the Project Overview; after which you can click on any tab in any order.

You MUST click the "Save" button at the bottom of each section in order to save your work in that section before selecting another tab.

Note that some of the questions on the Request Form have an (for information) icon associated with then; you can click this icon to get more detailed instructions for that question.

For more help see Help for the ERCAP Allocations Request Form.

Designating proxies to fill out the Request Form

Principal Investigators can designate one or more "PI Proxies" who write the request form for the PI (or in conjunction with the PI). See ERCAP Authorizations.

Help

If you need help filling out a request form please contact a NERSC consultant at 1-800-66-NERSC menu option 3, 1-510-486-8611, or consult@nersc.gov. If you have forgotten your NIM password please call the Account Support Office at 1-800-66-NERSC menu option 2, or 1-510-486-8612.