Please submit the complete project proposal for a compute project to the HLRN service at NHR@ZIB via the JARDS portal. A project proposal contains the four documents Stammdaten, Projektbeschreibung, Kurzbeschreibung, and a signed letter.four parts which are described in the sections below.

1. meta data
2. main proposal
3. public abstract
4. signed proposal summary

After submission, the proposal is evaluated in a review process organized reviewed by the HLRN external Scientific Board. Each reviewer obtains access to

• the project proposal,

• the history of previous projects,

• contact data of the HLRN consultant, and
• aggregated statistics for NPL usage of computung time on the HLRN NHR systems.

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Stammdaten Stammdaten

Meta Data

During the course of online submission, the project proposer needs to address meta data on the HLRN service portalprovide some metadata. This includes information about

• the principal investigator (scientist holding a PhD),
• the person in charge of submitting the proposal,
• project partners,
• other evaluations and fundings funding for the project,
• usage of other compute resources,
• project lifetime,
• software requirements (please check availability with your consultant before),
• compute time requirements, requirements in units core hour (at least 300 k core hour per quarter, see Application Guide), and
• storage requirements.

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Projektbeschreibung Projektbeschreibung

Main Proposal

The main proposal need to upload

• needs to be uploaded as a prepared document in PDF format,
• is written in English,

...

• An abstract of the project (to be updated with continuation proposal and project end)
  The appropriate HLRN LaTeX template can be downloaded from the HLRN web server.
  The abstract will be published on the HLRN webserver.
• For an initial application (new proposal): the project description
• For a continuation or extension proposal: the status report (progress report)
• Possibly attachments like publications (preprints) or others

The project description / status report / progress report should clearly describe the scientific purpose and goal as well as the methodology of the project. The requested resources should be comprehensibly justified.

The project description (for new proposal) or status report/progress report (for continuation or extension proposal) should comprise the following:

• Outline of the problem, aim and scope of the project and its subject-specific significance
• Outline of the mathematical and information technology aspects
• Outline of the applied or planned algorithmic, mathematical, and numerical methods and solution procedures
• Statements about the particular suitability of parallel computers for working on the problem
• Statements about the degree of parallelism and expected scalability behaviour (performance increase with increasing number of processors)
• Description and results of preparatory work (new proposal) or status report/progress report on the work accomplished in the previous project period (continuation or extension proposal); references and preprints (continuation proposal)
• Sound and comprehensible estimate of the requested resources (computing time, memory, temporary and permanent storage space) that should be supported through experiences or test computations on the HLRN or other comparable computer systems; the intended use of resources may be given in a monthly or quarterly table.
• Image Removed Projects with extended data storage requirements should give a detailed description of the I/O behaviour of the application (data management, amount and size of files generated during typical runs, I/O strategy used (global or task-local I/O, MPI I/O, netCDF, HDF5, etc.)). An estimate of the storage requirements should be made for scratch diskspace and tape storage for backup. Further, estimates for data transfer volume to tape and to the compute system should be given.
• Estimated duration of the project

The proposal should not exceed 10 pages. It can be submitted in English or German. A commented overview with examples can be found in the appplication workflow (PDF, in German only)Image Removed.

In case of questions regarding the required documents please contact your HLRN consultant .

Kurzbeschreibung

• Download: HLRNAbstractTemplate.zip: HLRN project abstract - template pack

...

• should be written in LaTeX based on the main_proposal_template_v1.5.zip. This template includes all relevant aspects like project description, computational facets and resource estimation. The LaTeX template includes both proposal types: initial and follow-up.

We recommend to use the following layout (The here integrated PDF viewer hides elements - please download the PDFs.):

• Initial proposal: sample.pdf
• Follow-up proposal: sample.pdf

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WhitelistStatus WhitelistStatus

The LaTeX template / PDF samples internally differentiate between a normal and a short version in case of whitelist status.
Whitelist status is granted by the scientific review board under three conditions:

• 1^st, you apply for a NHR "Normal project" as described in our JARDS guide: Compute Project#guideandassistance. NHR "Large projects" are excluded from the whitelist.
• 2^nd,  you are part of an active project by the DFG, any German federal ministry (e.g. BMBF), EU (e.g. Horizon), or VolkswagenStiftung. The proposal corresponding to this project needs to describe HPC resource requirements and discuss numerical methods.
• 3^rd, as evidence, you need to upload the corresponding project proposal and its review report to the JARDS online portal. We keep it confidential. If an upload is not possible due to confidentiality requirements, whitelisting is unfortunately not possible. 

Please avoid:

• Imprecise or incomprehensible estimation of requested computational resources (especially core-hours); for example, missing arguments to justify a certain number of N runs instead of a smaller number. One page is our recommended minimum.
• No proof, that the software to be used is suitable and efficient for parallel execution (and parallel I/O) on our current HPC systems architecture. Recycling a scalability demo by a third party is meaningless, without showing that your planned production run is fully comparable to it (algorithm selection within the software, I/O pattern, machine architecture, problem size per core).
• The overall aim and/or motivation behind the project is unclear.
• The applicant lacks HPC/Unix skills and an experienced co-applicant is missing.
• Insufficiency of the applicant's local resources is not indicated.
• The NHR@ZIB computing center was not mentioned in relevant publications.

In case of questions, please contact your consultant.

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Kurzbeschreibung Kurzbeschreibung

Public Abstract

All present, compute projects that have been successfully reviewed by the Scientific Board are listed on the project list. Each proposal for a compute project needs to submit a public abstract in PDF format based on the public abstract template (English/German). It should be generally understandable.

The abstract is written in English or in German and should contain about 2 pages. If you have no project ID yet (in case of an initial proposal) simply keep the default: "abn12345".

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Signedletter Signedletter

Signed Proposal Summary

By the end of the online submission a letter in PDF format is created by the HLRN service portal. The project proposer is requested to print and sign the document and finally to send it process, a summary is generated by JARDS which has to be signed and then either sent to the Office of the Scientific Board or reuploaded to JARDS. This also indicates that your application is successfully submitted.