D7.2: Report on Results from Projects Supported by Applications Enabling and Porting Services
Creators: name: Gabriel Hautreux
name: Chris Johnson
name: Sebastian Lührs
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2021
Subjects: Deliverable
HPC
Research infrastructure

description: Applications Enabling and Porting Services in Work Package 7 (WP7) of PRACE-6IP provides HPC enabling support for the applications of European researchers and small and medium enterprises to ensure the applications can effectively exploit the various PRACE HPC systems. Most of the activities are ongoing and were already established and described in deliverables of former PRACE-IP projects. There are four activities described in this deliverable:
T7.1 Applications Enabling Services for Preparatory Access:
This activity provides code enabling and optimisation to European researchers as well as industrial projects to make their applications ready for Tier-0 systems. Projects can continuously apply for such services via the Preparatory Access Calls Type C (PA Type C) and Type D (PA Type D) with a cut-off every three months for evaluation of the proposals. PA Type C provides support and access to a PRACE Tier-0 system while PA Type D provides support and access to a PRACE Tier-1 system to finally reach Tier-0 scalability. In total ten Preparatory Access cut-offs have been carried out in PRACE-6IP and 21 projects received support within the context of the project.
Beside the statistical overview about the cut-offs and all supported PRACE PA Type C and Type D projects, the report focuses on the optimisation work and results gained by the completed projects in PRACE-6IP. In total twelve PA projects have finished their work since the last deliverable D7.1 of PRACE-6IP and are reported within this deliverable.
T7.2 Applications Enabling Services for Industry (SHAPE):
This activity has continued the support for SHAPE (the SME HPC Adoption Programme in Europe) throughout the PRACE-6IP project. SHAPE aims to assist European SMEs by offering them a free, low risk opportunity to try applying HPC to their business processes with an aim to increase their competitiveness. Calls are issued twice per year with successful applicants receiving support effort from a PRACE HPC expert and access to machine time at a PRACE centre.
Throughout PRACE-6IP SHAPE has focussed on increasing the number of proposals, as well as increasing the number of countries benefiting from SHAPE support. This has been a great success. Since regular calls were introduced and up until the SHAPE 10 call, the average number of proposals received per call was just under 6. From SHAPE 11 onwards proposal numbers have increased significantly with the average number of proposals between SHAPE 11 and SHAPE 14 having more than doubled to just over 12. The SHAPE 12 call received a record 16 proposals, then beaten by the SHAPE 14 call receiving a record 19 proposals. This has continued to be greatly assisted by the employment in September 2019 of a PRACE Industry Liaison Officer who has engaged with hundreds of SMEs via face-to-face meetings and industry-specific trade shows, as well as advising on publicity and communication with SMEs.
Up to the SHAPE 9 call SHAPE had received proposals from 17 of the 26 eligible countries. The SHAPE+ initiative was then introduced where an allocation of effort is provided to support SMEs from countries new to SHAPE in cases where the local partners do not have existing SHAPE effort. This produced a noticeable increase in the number of countries participating with 23 of the eligible countries now having produced proposals.
The success of SHAPE can also be demonstrated in more qualitative ways. A set of Success Stories have been produced and displayed on the PRACE website, and successful past projects have been highlighted to potential applicants via flyers created from projects from previous calls. In addition, we received an overwhelmingly positive response when surveying SMEs a year or so after their project has ended. The results of this can be seen within this deliverable.
T7.3 DECI Management and Applications Porting:
The DECI (Distributed European Computing Initiative) programme provides access to Tier-1 resources across Europe via a resource exchange programme and for the last few years calls have been issued yearly. Support for DECI has continued throughout PRACE-6IP.
Calls remain popular with researchers and since the programme began, over 1200 proposals have been received with the most recent two calls receiving 68 and 81 proposals respectively from 25 different countries resulting in 48 and 55 projects respectively. The most recent call awarded 250 M machine core hours to projects from 17 different countries on systems from 10 different countries.
T7.5 Enhancing the High-Level Support Teams:
T7.5 is a new task implemented in PRACE-6IP. It provides additional effort to enhance the work of the PRACE High-Level Support Teams (HLSTs). Under PRACE 2, there are coordinated HLSTs at each Tier-0 centre that provide users with support for code enabling and scaling out of scientific applications and methods, as well as for Research & Development on code refactoring on the Tier-0 systems. The HLSTs will enhance the scientific output of the Tier-0 systems through the provision of level 3 (midterm activities) support activities. Task 7.5 supplements those activities and extends this work with specific expertise from the other PRACE centres. This ensures sharing of expertise across PRACE to maximise the benefits to users of the PRACE systems. Task 7.5 will work with the HLSTs to extend and enhance their activities supporting Tier-0 users, and also Tier-1 intensive users targeting Tier-0, in order to maximise the scientific output of the Tier-0 systems.
During the first half of the project, we focused on defining the process of project selection, based on criteria that meet what Tier-0 systems can provide to the users (scalability, new architectures, memory/storage ...) and a few projects started.
During the second half of the project the activity continued on petascale and pre-exascale systems, which were the main targets for the activity, and the effort of the partners involved in the task help users to leverage their application to larger systems, enabling them to perform larger simulation in the most efficient manner, as recommended by the PRACE experts that provided support during the activity.