Free Blocks of Supercomputing Time
Researchers at member institutions are eligible for free blocks of supercomputing time at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Awards are made on the basis of applications submitted by researchers for work which has relevance to the DOE mission to the PSC Allocations Department. The application process involves completing an online application form, including a short abstract about the proposed work. No detailed proposal is required.
The awards are made at three levels:
Starter grants allow researchers to explore PSC resources, learn how these resources may assist in energy research, optimize preliminary code optimization, and similar types of “orientation” activities. Starter grants provide up to 1000 processor hours on the Intel cluster, with 20 4-processor compute nodes, lemieux, a terascale HP Alphaserver Cluster comprising 750 4-processor compute nodes, or rachel, a set of SMP machines, each with 64 1.15 GHz EV 7 processors and 256 Gbytes of shared memory
Intermediate grants offer up to 30,000 processor hours on the Intel cluster, lemieux, or rachel.
Large grants are awarded for research requiring more than 30,000 processor hours on either of the three machines and require explicit NETL sponsorship. A sponsor must be an NETL employee who can verify that the proposed research is relevant to the DOE's energy and environmental mission.
Contacts:
At WVU, researchers may contact Richard A. Bajura, director of the National Research Center for Coal & Energy, for help in identifying the appropriate contacts at NETL, (304) 293-2867 x. 5401, Richard.Bajura@mail.wvu.edu.
For technical assistance, WVU researchers may contact Don McLaughlin at (304) 293-0405 x. 4258 or Don.McLaughlin@mail.wvu.edu or Frances Vanscoy at (304) 293-0405 x. 4181, fvanscoy@mix.wvu.edu.