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 (please see details below).After submission the proposal is evaluated in a review process organized by the HLRN 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 reviewed by the 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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Anker
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 requirementsrequirements in units core hour (at least 300 k core hour per quarter, see Application Guide), and
• storage requirements.

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Projektbeschreibung

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Projektbeschreibung

Main Proposal

The main proposal

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The proposal

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• uploaded as a prepared document in PDF format,

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• is written in English

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This documents includes the main scientific content of the proposal and might be aligned to the following structure.

• Abstract (about 0.5 pages)

1. Project description
   1. Problem description and aims of the project
   2. Scientific significance, innvation, expected results, utilization of results (about 1-2 pages for a.+b.)
   3. Mathematical modeling used
   4. Technology and tools for numerical solution (about 1-2 pages for c.+d.)

   5. Preliminary studies/results of the preceding project (about 2-3 pages)

   6. Descriptions of research plan and work packages (about 1-1.5 pages)
2. Computational facets
   1. Software, libraries, licences, target architecture (a list)
   2. Necessity of parallel computing hardware (about 0.5 pages)
   3. Concept for parallelization, scaling properties, application performance (about 1.5 pages)
      1. Parallel efficiency, strong/weak scaling
      2. Performance properties, precondition for estimations in the resource plan
      3. Necessity of HLRN resource, larger than e.g. university
3. Resource estimation
   1. Detailed plan for compute time and NPL (see Accounting and NPL), work plan (1-1.5 pages)
   2. Storage demands, scaling properties for I/O
4. Literature
5. Appendix
   1. Funding decisions
   2. Publication list

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• ,

• 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 NPL/ 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 specific supercomputercurrent HPC systems architecture. Recycling a scalability proof 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 HLRN NHR@ZIB computing center was not mentioned in relevant publications.
• Cut & paste of previous proposals.

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

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Kurzbeschreibung Kurzbeschreibung

Public Abstract

All present HLRN , compute projects that have been successfully reviewed by the Scientific Board are listed on the HLRN project list. Each proposal for a compute project needs to submit a Kurzbeschreibung / project public abstract in PDF format based on the HLRN 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.

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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.