D2.1: Migration from DEISA2 to PRACE-2IP
Creators: name: Fagerholm, Juha
name: Kennedy, Alison
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2011
Subjects: Deliverable
HPC
Research infrastructure

description: The DECI programme for high-end scientific projects in HPC was started in 2005 by the EC-funded DEISA project. The programme was based on the access to the top-level European HPC systems. Within the DEISA project, the programme had six calls which proved to be very successful. After the DEISA projects ended in April 2011, the DECI programme has been migrated to PRACE. The first PRACE DECI pilot call, DECI-7, was opened already in May 2011 by PRACE-1IP synchronously with the PRACE 3rd regular call. In total, 54 proposals were received. The Principal Investigators of these proposals represented 17 European countries. The call was oversubscribed by a factor over 2.5. Of the proposals, 35 DECI-7 projects were selected, beginning to run on November 1st, 2011, on the Tier-1 systems provided by 15 PRACE partners who contributed over 90 million CPU core hours.<br> This deliverable describes also the processes involved in the DECI project management as they have been migrated to PRACE. The PRACE operational environment on the Tier-1 systems is not described.<br> The first pilot call was prepared in a very short time. Experiences from the pilot call were used by for the launching of the next, DECI-8, call in November 2011. The processes for the launch need still to be refined, and improvements have been planned for the forthcoming call in 2012. The proposal submission was based on email and MS Word proposal templates as in DEISA due to lack of preparation time. The templates were modified from the DEISA templates to PRACE type templates. If the amount of proposals grows in the future, the collecting of forms by email will be too tedious and a more advanced database system is needed, such as what is used for PRACE Tier-0 proposals or HPC-Europa proposals.<br> The technical evaluation or review was performed by experts in the home sites of the proposals. The notion of a home site is specific to DECI and means a site in the country of affiliation of the Principal Investigator. For other countries, a list of home sites is used. The technical evaluation form was adapted from the one used in DEISA. After the experiences in DECI-7, improvements have been introduced for the next call. The scientific evaluation or peer review is different from PRACE Tier-0 calls. The proposals with a PI from DECI countries were evaluated by a national peer review committee countries except proposals from Poland; proposals from countries outside the DECI countries and Poland were reviewed by HPC-Europa SUSP.<br> For computer resources, a commitment by the DECI partners is needed. The resources are normalised by a conversion factor which is based on processor speed and the overall architecture. This is adapted also from DEISA but new factors have been agreed within PRACE. In DECI-7, 15% of the resources were reserved for projects external to DECI countries. Rest of the resources were exchanged between DECI countries. The best projects were selected based on the ranking by the scientific evaluation. Projects were entered in the DECI Project Management database set up at SARA; it is used to follow their progress.<br> Application support and porting is provided by the PRACE-2IP project WP7 task T7.2. This support starts with the proposal phase and continues for accepted projects in meetings with the project group to present the services of PRACE. Special support is given to projects that have asked for application enabling. All projects will be followed in monthly video conferences where both WP2 and T7.2 are present. Project reports will be collected and stored in the BSCW for PRACE use.<br> Discussion on future improvements has been included on proposal submission and launching the calls. Improvements are also related to the growing number of partners and proposals and collaboration with the Tier-0 project management. To clarify the future of DECI, the possibility of the PRACE Optional Programme is recommended to be investigated by WP2.