Director’s Discretionary Call – DiRAC High Performance Computing Facility

Call for DiRAC Director’s Discretionary proposals

Application deadline 23rd November 2020.

The DiRAC Director will make a number of large discretionary awards of time on two DiRAC services during the period 1st December 2020 – 31st March 2021. In total, approximately 32m core hours are available in this call.

In addition, Research Software Engineering (RSE) projects of up to 3 months’ duration will be considered.

Scope of call:

DiRAC will be able to make a number of large discretionary awards of time on two of our services during the period August 2020-March 2021. Proposals should be ambitious in scope – these awards will be made to proposals of outstanding scientific interest and timeliness and which can demonstrate significant benefit from concurrent access to large numbers of nodes.

All codes used must have undergone a technical review as part of the RAC process. Codes which have not done cannot be considered in this call.

All awarded time must be used by March 31st 2021 and no requests to extend beyond this date will be accepted.

Application process:

Proposals should be submitted using the Discretionary Call application form or the RSE Support application form. The forms are available below:DiRAC Directors Call Application Form Nov 2020 finalDownload Discretionary Call DiRAC RSE Support Application FormDownload

You must include the application number where the required technical case associated with the software to be used in this application can be obtained. You do not need to resubmit technical information that you have already provided however, you may be asked to provide evidence of the scalability of your codes if you will be using the code at a larger scale than was previously requested.

Assessment process:

Proposals will be reviewed by the Director, the RAC chairs and members of the RAC panels.

Assessment criteria:

Proposals will be assessed according the following criteria:

    1. Scientific impact – 60%
    2. Track record of user/group – 20%
    3. Timeliness/urgency – 20%

Closing date:

Applications should be submitted by e-mail to DiscretionaryCall@leicester.ac.uk by 5pm on Monday, 23rd November 2020.