New challenge for Slovak scientists: Accessing supercomputer Leonardo
In November 2022, the Leonardo consortium, which consists of six European countries led by Italy, procured and put into operation the currently sixth most powerful supercomputer in the world. Slovakia, as one of the members of the consortium, provides the project through the Computing Centre of SAS its HPC expertise and high-level technical and engineering support to user communities. Thanks to this, Slovak users have a unique opportunity to participate in the national challenge and gain access to the Leonardo system.
The supercomputer Leonardo has a performance of approximately 250 PFlop/s, while the total allocation available for Slovak projects is 56,000 GPU node-hours and 25,000 CPU node-hours per year. Therefore, the Computing Centre of SAS, in cooperation with the National Supercomputing Centre, opens the first call for applications for access to Leonardo computing capacities. Considering the size of the allocation, a smaller number of projects will be supported, especially those that require the simultaneous use of a large number of computing nodes.
Access is open to all areas of science and research, applicants from Slovak public universities or SAS institutes are eligible. Supported projects are intended to enable progress and innovation in the chosen field with added value for solutions to social and/or technological challenges in Slovakia.
The applications used in the projects are to be tested, with proven high efficiency and scalability on HPC systems or the need for a large set of simulations that require a large amount of CPU/GPU time. It should be highly parallelized applications able to efficiently use available resources, the allocation of which would be problematic on the current national HPC infrastructure (Devana HPC system). The need for computing power and the use of resources must be clearly and thoroughly described in the proposal. The specification of individual Leonardo modules can be found HERE.
The call is open until January 31, 2024. The evaluation and selected projects will be published two weeks after the deadline, successful applicants will be informed about the next procedure by email. The individual projects will be evaluated by the professional staff of Computing Centre of SAS and NSCC with regard to the scientific contribution and the most efficient use of computing capacities. Projects with a maximum duration of 12 months can be submitted through the register.nscc.sk user portal. After registration, you need to fill out the form in the Projects / Leonardo project section.
Before submitting an application, we ask interested parties to thoroughly familiarize themselves with terms and conditions of this call.
In case of questions or ambiguities, please contact us at eurocc@nscc.sk.
Prepared by: Halyna Hyryavets, National Competence Center for HPC
Photo: National Supercomputing Centre