Call Advanced Computing Projects (5th ed) - A2 and A3 | Fast-track

The Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) seeks to aggregate national advanced computing resources, promoting cooperation between the various centres involved and developing national and international partnerships with other entities. Under the terms of the Advanced Computing Projects Regulation, published under no. 10/2022 in the Diário da República, the allocation of national computing resources is made following a tender procedure whose terms are publicised on the FCT website.

Are beneficiaries, individually or in co-promotion:

• R&D (Research and Development) institutions;
• Collaborative laboratories;
• Technological interface centers;
• Science and technology infrastructures;
• Science and technology networks and consortia;
• Private non-profit institutions whose main objective is R&D activities;
• Digital Innovation Poles;
• Other public and private non-profit institutions that develop or participate in research, development, or innovation activities;
• Companies developing advanced computing projects in research, development or innovation activities;
• Individuals operating in Portugal and who wish to develop advanced computing projects in any scientific area.

Regarding applications from companies as beneficiaries, the advanced computing projects should:

• occur within the scope of pre-competitive research and innovation, without market value;
• not exceed 50% of the total computational allocation to be allocated in this cal

• High Performance Computing (HPC)
• Artificial Intelligence Computing (IA)
• Scientific Cloud Computing (SCC)

These advanced computational models aim to support applications in various areas, such as bioinformatics, climate, materials and life science, computational chemistry, physics, and civil engineering, among others, thus supporting research and enhancing the competitiveness of the national industry.

• A0 – Experimental Access recommended for teams with no previous experience or history of using RNCA resources to test and explore the available HPC, AI, Cloud or visualisation resources for 6 months.
• A1 – Development Access recommended for software performance testing, code optimisation, scalability testing, benchmarking, re-factoring for 3 - 12 months.
• A2 – Regular Access recommended for scientific or innovation projects whose team has consolidated previous experience and needs resources in Deucalion and/or Cirrus+Stratus platforms for 12 months.
• A3 - Larger Access recommended for scientific or innovation projects whose team has consolidated previous experience and require larger amounts of resources on the Deucalion or MareNostrum 5 platforms for 12 months.

See more details on the limits and maximum duration for each type in section 3 of the Call Notice - check supporting documentation in the sidebar.

FAST-TRACK

According to the call notice, A2 and A3 applications that fulfil at least one of the following criteria:
a) Be associated with project(s) of the IR or co-IR approved with prior evaluation of scientific merit in Advanced Computing Project Calls (CPCA) in the last 3 years;
b) Each application is associated with a project approved by the PI or co-RI in another call funded by FCT in the last 3 years, and the project is active at the time of application;
       - Are exempt from a new assessment of scientific merit. -
 

If they fulfil one of the above conditions, after administrative validation these applications will be redirected through the ‘fast track’, and will only be subject to administrative validation and technical suitability.

Administrative validation (valid/not valid) with the following criteria:

• Compliance with call requirements;
• Existence of previous funded project;

Qualitative technical assessment (accepted/not accepted) with the following criteria:

• T1: Technical fitting to RNCA resources;
• T2: Computational resources reasonability and capacity planning.
• T3: Work Plan.

. Accepted applications will be dealt with in rounds and on a first-come, first-served basis until the defined quota is exhausted.

A2 and A3 applications must be submitted in English via form on the myFCT platform. What differentiates each of these types is the amount of requested resources and the prior experience of the users.

The following limits defined in the notice of call apply (see point 3.2 of the notice):

A2 Access type

• Resources limit: from 100,000 up to 3,000,000 CPU core.hours, 8,760 GPU.hours, 12-month duration

A3 Access type

• Resources limit: from 3,000,000 up to 30,000,000 CPU core.hours, 100,000 GPU.hours, 12-month duration.

Each IR can submit a maximum of ONE application in each typology, subject to the availability of resources (see point 9 of the notice).

Information about applications can be requested through the email address: computacao-avancada@fccn.pt 

No information published on this page replaces or supersedes the Regulation and the Call Notice.