Advanced Computing Projects

The annual Calls of FCT Advanced Computing Projects seeks to increase the national and international competitiveness of science and technology, as well as contribute to innovation and knowledge transfer, and to the achievement of global aspirations defined in the 2030 Agenda: United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In this context, it is particularly important to promote and strengthen the skills of scientific and technological institutions through the participation of their teams in advanced computing projects.

The Call of projects in Advanced Computing in all scientific areas has an annual periodicity. The evaluation of the proposals is done by two independent panels: the technical suitability is evaluated by elements that manage the computational resources requested and the scientific merit is evaluated by panels of experts, predominantly affiliated to foreign institutions, experienced and of recognized merit and competence, constituted by scientific domain.

Calls is intended to allocate computer resources through the following types of access:

Experimental Access (A0) - recommended for teams with no previous experience or history of using computer resources or for using visualization resources.
Development Access (A1) - recommended for software performance testing, code optimization, scalability testing, benchmarking, re-factoring or for projects that don't require a lot of resources on either platform.
Regular Access (A2) - recommended for scientific or innovation projects in which the team has consolidated previous experience. Exclusive for resources on the platforms of the National Distributed Computing Infrastructure, the Advanced Computing Laboratory of the University of Coimbra and the HPC Center of the University of Évora.
Larger Access (A3) - for large research and innovation projects whose team has consolidated previous experience. Exclusive for resources on the new Deucalion and MareNostrum 5 platforms.

And they provide the following computational models:

High Performance Computing allows you to run parallel processing applications, access GPUs, access machines with high memory capacity, and more.
Cloud Computing or Virtual Research Environment allows you to run complex applications, host services such as web servers, databases, portals, create test and development environments, create virtual machines, run linux containers, access GPUs, manage your resources in a flexible way, access EGI's Federated Cloud, among others.