Project Application for using the HPC Systems

General Information about the HPC Project Application

The use of the high performance computers requires a project proposal. By a scientific review process it can be granted for one year. The project duration may differ from one year; if necessary, the project is subject to several periods of approval. It is possible at any time to apply for new or additional projects, which will be granted depending on the availability of the resources. The HPC project manager should be an institute director, hold a university professorship or head a research group. The project managers are required to inform the ZIH about any changes according the project staff (retirements, change to another institute).

Review process
For all projects above the following threshold for trial projects, two scientific reviews will be obtained. This can take up to 12 weeks.
Projects with a demand above 15 million CPUh or currently 40.000 GPUh are submitted to the NHR utilization committee. This meets only 1x at the end of each quarter.
Please keep this in mind.

Each applicant undertakes to assist in the evaluation of other applications within this framework.

Trial Projects

Trial projects are projects applications with up to 42.000 CPUh/month or 400 GPUh/month. For higher resource requirements, in addition to the online application a detailed project description is required.

Terms of Use

The current terms of use for the HPC systems are available here (German only).

Contract Research

HPC access for research projects funded by public funding agencies (EU, Federal Government, DFG, State, ...) is free of charge. Projects that carry out contract research for third parties incur proportional costs per kWh of electricity consumed per quarter. For questions about the actual fee please contact Claudia Schmidt.

HPC Management System for Project Administration

Project managers and project administrators have access to the HPC Management System (access via ZIH login).  There you get an overview of current projects, observe resource usage and add staff to your projects. (Extension requests are currently not possible here).

Initial Application

New applications are processed as soon as the following three parts are received.

1. Online Project Application

We welcome project proposals on data and computationally intensive HPC applications (e.g., FEM, CFD, and MD simulations) as well as on data analytics and machine learning (e.g., Apache Spark and Tensorflow) with processing of particularly large data sets.
In doing so, we preferably support NHR projects (NHR: National High Performance Computing) in Dresden that correspond to our research focus areas.

HPC Project Application

==> NO WINDOWS-Support. Windows-User have the possibility to apply a Application of    Research-Cloud- /    Enterprise-Cloud    

Some information about the content of the application you can find in our  User Guide

Further information you may find on the overview about our HPC systems.

2. Login Application

Users with valid ZIH login can be added to HPC projects by project managers in the HPC Management System. (Alternatively, use this form in the Self Service Portal.)

Users without ZIH login please use this form in our Self Service Portal to get access to the HPC system (Please send the pdf generated there to TU Dresden, ZIH - Service Desk, 01062 Dresden or by fax 0351 463 42328 or by email to )

3. Project Description

To complete the application a detailed project description of about 3-5 pages is necessary (not required for trial projects). Some hints about the content:

• Description of problem and project content (with publication references)
• Description of preliminary work, pre-studies with results and experiences
• Description of objectives and expected findings
• Description of methods
• Information about required resources (CPU-h/GPU-h, parallel processing, memory and storage, preferred storage connection), data formats
  Brief sample calculations or estimates based on experiments/testing performed that justify resource requirements are beneficial.
• 1-2 figures are helpful to understand the description

Here you find templates for Word and LateX:

Extension

Extension of Projects

One and two months before the end of the project the project manager or the contact person will receive an email. Regardless of whether it is a trial project or a regular project, an application in the new application system HPC Project Application is now required for an extension. Please refer to the current project you would like to extend (enter project code: p_.....). For regular projects a status report is expected. Below you will find templates to help you to give us the necessary information.

Please feel free to direct any questions to  .

Extension of HPC Login

The extension of the HPC login is only required for TU external users. Please complete this Form in the Self Service Portal.

Acknowledgment in Publications

To provide you with modern and powerful HPC systems in future as well, we have to show that these systems help to advance research. For that purpose we rely on your help.
In most cases, the results of your computations are used for presentations and publications, especially in peer-reviewed magazines, journals, and conference proceedings. We kindly ask you to mention the HPC resource usage in the acknowledgment section of all publications that are based on granted HPC resources of the TU Dresden. Examples:

• The authors gratefully acknowledge the GWK support for funding this project by providing computing time through the Center for Information Services and HPC (ZIH) at TU Dresden.
• or
  The authors are grateful to the Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing [Zentrum für Informationsdienste und Hochleistungsrechnen (ZIH)] at TU Dresden for providing its facilities for high throughput calculations.
• Die Autoren danken Bund und Land Sachsen für die Unterstützung bei der Finanzierung dieses Projektes mit der Bereitstellung von Rechenzeit durch das Zentrum für Informationsdienste und Hochleistungsrechnen (ZIH) an der TU Dresden.

Please send us references of appeared publications, so that we can refer to them in the context of follow-up applications for the procurement of infrastructure!