Accelerated Scientific Discovery

Overview

Note

This project has cleared thie initial proposal stage and the final proposal is due prior to January 10, 2022.

According to the full proposal request:

Your full proposal should follow the guidelines provided for University ASD proposals at https://www2.cisl.ucar.edu/university-asd. This will be similar to the normal NSC proposal format, with additional attention to project readiness, team commitment, and your analysis and data management plan. You may omit discussion of strategic relevance since that has been assessed in Phases 1 and 2.

Note that your full proposal should be completed and submitted via the allocation submission site.

Warning

The CISL “University ASD” link above was broken when the new CISL website was unvieled in December 2021. The guidelines from that now-lost page are reproduced below.

Proposal document

Proposals should be five pages or less for Sections A–E below. The data management plan, accomplishment reports, references, and figures (Sections F–I) should be an additional five pages or less. The proposal should address each numbered item; please retain the section and item numbering and order in your responses.

Note: The request document must identify all PIs and Co-Is on any associated awards. In addition, the web submission form must include the names and affiliations of all PIs and Co-Is on the supporting NSF grant(s) and a complete list of collaborators and their institutions.

A. Project title and PIs

On the first page of the ASD proposal document please include the following:

ASD project title PIs and Co-Is on the supporting NSF award(s) along with their institution CPU core-hours and/or GPU hours requested Peak disk space needed

B. Scientific objectives

Describe the scientific problem that will be studied and its importance. This section should include discussion of related work recently completed by the PIs and other scientists along with supporting references; describe the linkage between the NSF award(s) and the proposed ASD activity (especially important if the published NSF award abstract does not clearly describe the computational component of the work funded or if the work is a “natural extension” of the funded work).

C. Computational plan

Discussion of your planned computational experiments and the resources needed should comprise the bulk of the five-page proposal.

Describe the numerical approach or models to be used. (For a non-standard or non-community model, the numerical description should briefly describe the approximations and other methods proposed to obtain valid solutions to the problem.)

Describe the computational experiments being proposed and how they relate to the scientific objectives in sufficient detail for reviewers to confirm the estimate of system resources required.

Describe the number of CPU core-hours and/or GPU hours required for each proposed experiment and the total resources for the request, including the total data written to disk, sufficient for reviewers to assess the appropriateness and efficiency of the data management plan. Explain how the number of core-hours per simulated year was determined.

Provide a table summarizing the number of CPU core-hours, GPU hours, and storage space required for each experimental configuration and the total for the proposed set of computational experiments.

D. Code requirements and readiness

The reviewers will use this section to assess the readiness of the code to run successfully and efficiently as soon as Derecho becomes available.

Describe the model or code to be used in a few sentences, including an assessment of its current readiness to run on Derecho. Please include the name of the model or code. You may cite a web page where the model or code is described.

Describe your proposed project’s special programming or runtime environment requirements. For example, required software, libraries, wall-clock time, scratch disk space needs, particularly if they differ significantly from what is currently available by default on Cheyenne today.

Benchmarks and scalability

Benchmarking system and results: Please summarize benchmark details or reference web page. Describe the model or code’s scalability on current systems and estimate the maximum number of Derecho nodes that could be used efficiently.

Other special requirements

E. Data analysis and visualization

ASD projects may be granted allocations on the Casper cluster in addition to Derecho allocations. CISL will provide help in constructing visualizations to improve understanding and presentation of results. Please describe plans or estimated needs for data analysis and visualization resources following the ASD project period on Derecho.

Supporting information

Sections F–I together should be an additional five pages or less.

F. Data management plan

Because of the potential for large-scale Derecho projects to produce extensive data output, the project’s short-term disk storage needs and the ASD project data targeted for longer-term storage should be described in Section C. The Data Management Plan should be used to provide additional explanation of the project’s data needs and plans.

Disk space

Describe the project’s medium-term disk needs for data analysis and visualization following completion of the primary HPC runs through the submission of the final report in March 2023.

Storage space

NCAR will provide storage space, commensurate with review panel recommendations, for up to one year after the ASD project ends. Describe any longer-term storage needs and/or relevant plans for sharing or managing the resulting data over the longer term.

Offsite data transfer

Discuss the amount of data to be transferred to another center and the frequency of transfers.

G. Accomplishment report on prior large allocations

The reviewers will use the accomplishment report to judge the proposing team’s experience with large-scale computations and their likelihood of ASD success on Derecho. The accomplishment report should focus on research in the past five years conducted with large (merit-reviewed) computing allocations at NCAR or other HPC centers. In addition to summarizing the computational experiments and scientific outcomes, the accomplishment report should note

the scientific publications produced,
the number of graduate students that worked on each large allocation project,
the theses produced, if any.

H. References

Please limit references to those directly related to the proposed project.

I. Figures and captions

Optional. Figures may be embedded within the first five pages of the proposal document; however, embedded figures will count against the five-page limit.