Please submit the complete project proposal for a compute project at NHR@ZIB via the JARDS portal. A project proposal contains four parts which are described in the sections below.

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

Meta Data

During the course of online submission, the project proposer needs to provide 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 funding for the project,
• usage of other compute resources,
• project lifetime,
• software requirements (please check availability with your consultant before),
• requirements in units core hour (at least 300 k core hour per quarter, see Application Guide), and
• storage requirements.

Main Proposal

The main proposal

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

• 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

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.
• 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 was not mentioned in relevant publications (please use this acknowledgement).

The LaTeX template / PDF samples internally differentiate between a normal and a shorter version in case of whitelist status (optional).
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 ("Projektantrag") and its admission letter ("Bewilligungsschreiben") to the JARDS online portal. Content-related comments/statements from the reviewers are not required. We keep all documents confidential. If an upload is not possible due to confidentiality requirements, whitelisting is unfortunately not possible. 

If you have doubts as to whether all three conditions are met, simply write your application including a scientific part (see template). Whitelisting is optional and has the only advantage of skipping the scientific part of the proposal.
In case of questions, please contact your consultant.

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".

Signed Proposal Summary

By the end of the online submission 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.