31 new projects with access to national supercomputers

The FCT, through its FCCN Unit, has announced the provisional results of type A2 – Project or Regular Access for the 3rd edition Call Advanced Computing Call , with the approval of 31 computing projects. In total, approximately 36 million core hours, 23,000 GPU hours, and 760 TB of storage have been allocated. With an approval rate of 60%, the FCT will thus support projects that require computing tools with a total economic value of approximately €450,000.

The 31 projects will be developed by teams with consolidated and proven previous experience in advanced computing on one of the platforms of the National Advanced Computing Network (RNCA).

This edition featured a new access modality— Virtual Research Environments (VRE)—to meet the collaboration needs of researchers from one or more organizations through cloud computing. Of the 31 projects approved, 3 will be developed in VREs, 27 will have access to High Performance Computing (HPC), and 1 project will combine HPC with Cloud Computing (SCC). Around 20 national institutions are supported, including a national R&D company that develops innovative offshore renewable energy solutions.

Teams have 12 months to execute HPC and SCC projects or 24 months for VRE projects on one of the national platforms – Advanced Computing Laboratory of the University of Coimbra (LCA-UC), High Performance Computing of the University of Évora (HPC-UÉ), and National Distributed Computing Infrastructure (INCD). These centers provide the user community with various computing services (HPC, HTC, Cloud, and others, particularly in terms of technological capacity) with the aim of supporting applications in various areas, such as bioinformatics, climate, materials and life sciences, computational chemistry, physics, and civil engineering, among others, enhancing the competitiveness of national research and innovation activities.

The approved projects cover all scientific fields, distributed as follows:

• Physics and Mathematics – 23%
• Chemistry and Materials – 26%
• Life Sciences – 19%
• Engineering and Technology – 13%
• Earth and Environmental Sciences – 13%
• Social Sciences – 6%

The following demographic data are also noteworthy:

• 74% of principal investigators are male and only 26% are female.
• About 20 national institutions from various regions of the country, including the islands.

To date, the Advanced Calls have supported more than 300 computational projects from around 100 national institutions, including the autonomous regions of the Azores and Madeira, and have allocated more than 100 million CPU core hours or vCPU hours. There are more than 50 scientific publications and 60 Master's or Doctoral theses associated with projects approved under these Calls.

Applications for types A1 and A0 remain open until May 31, at 1 p.m. Lisbon time, and a new information session will be held on May 16, at 11:30 a.m.

Further information and registration at RNCA.