Please read the criteria for PRACE prototype access and the prototype description before filling up the prototype access form (doc).

Who can apply for PRACE prototype access

Proposals from academia and industry are eligible, as long as the organisation of the project leader is homed in Europe (or a PRACE initiative country).

Depending on the system vendor, researchers from some countries cannot be granted access due to export regulations.

The general conditions for prototype access are:

• Prototypes are intended for testing and not for standard production work.

• As a general rule application support (e.g. code development, optimisation, parallelisation, etc.) during prototype testing is limited.
• Prototype access is granted after technical review by the PRACE centre hosting the prototype.
• The maximum project duration is 3 months.
• Applicants must agree that applicants’ names and affiliations, as well as a summary of the project purpose and the results achieved during prototype testing, may be made publicly available in the PRACE website and may be used in PRACE deliverables and other PRACE documents.
• Applicants must agree to summarise the results of the project in an end report to be sent to the PRACE centre hosting the prototype not later than 1 month after project conclusion.
• The project leader is responsible for signing and fulfilling the usage agreements issued by the PRACE centre hosting the prototype.
• Proposals are accessed by the PRACE Prototype Access Committee with representatives from the prototype host centre and representatives from PRACE WP5 and WP6.
• Applicants have the right to reply to the granting decisions. Application replies will be handled by the PRACE Technical Board.
   

More details on the PRACE prototypes can be found at http://www.prace-project.eu/documents/PRACE-Prototypes.pdf and http://www.prace-project.eu/documents/wp8_prototypes.pdf

Calls

The application deadline for the second call of 2010 is April 11 for decisions on May 1.
 

Criteria for PRACE prototype access

One of the main goals of the PRACE project is investigating petascale prototypes and carrying out research into scaling and optimising applications on petascaling machines. In order to access the PRACE prototypes, your application will be reviewed using a number of criteria. Priority will be given to applications that are on different applications to those already being investigated by PRACE (read more from this pdf file). There is a limited amount of time available in the prototype systems so access will only be given to those proposals that aim to investigate performance of an application, scale the application or carry out optimisations. There should be no production runs and as such there will be no consideration given to any potential new scientific results obtained. 

The following criteria will be used to assess proposals for access to the PRACE prototypes:

1.    Amount of time requested.
2.    Potential of information being useful to the PRACE project.
3.    Evaluation and testing purposes only.
4.    The code being investigated – codes already included in the PRACE                benchmarking suite will not be given high priority.
5.    Comparisons of prototypes.
6.    Written assessment of results.
7.    Research into potential petascale optimisation techniques.
8.    Licensing of the code.

In order to be properly assessed the proposal should include information on all the above points.