31 new projects with access to national supercomputers

Through its FCCN Unit, the FCT has released the provisional results of type A2 - Project or Regular Access of the 3rd edition of the Call for Advanced Computing Projects, with the approval of 31 computing projects. In total, around 36 M 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 around €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 Network for Advanced Computing (RNCA).

This edition included a new type of access - Virtual Research Environments (VRE) - to meet the needs of collaboration between 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 being supported, including a national R&D company developing innovative offshore renewable energy solutions.

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

The approved projects cover all scientific fields with the following distribution:

• 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 should also be highlighted:

• 74% of the researchers in charge are male and only 26% female.
• Around 20 national institutions from various regions of the country, including the islands.

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

Applications for the A1 and A0 typologies remain open until May 31 at 13:00 Lisbon time, and a new information session will be held on May 16 at 11:30.

More information and registration with the RNCA.