| Cycle | Application Period | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Q2’20-Round | 4 May 2020 to 30 June 2020 (CLOSED) | Projects Ended |
| Q4’20-Round | November to |
Projects Ongoing |
| Q2’21-Round | 1 May 2021 – 30 June 2021 (CLOSED) | Projects Ongoing |
| Ad-hoc* | Any time | Accepting Applications |
*As of November 2021, the 4th Call for Educational HPC Projects will be deferred until further notice. In the meantime, you may submit applications on an ad-hoc basis via our application form if you wish to make use of NSCC’s resources under this scheme. Please note that the lead time will be 2-4 weeks.
Do look out for the 4th Call for Educational HPC Projects after the launch of the new supercomputer.
1. Overview
On 12 March 2019, the Singapore government announced that S$200 million will be allocated by the National Research Foundation (NRF) to support the upgrading of Singapore’s supercomputing infrastructure. As a national research infrastructure, NSCC will be extending these supercomputing resources to local research institutes, companies and institutes of higher learning (IHLs), which include autonomous universities and polytechnics. While education-based curriculum and projects have access to wet-lab experiments, high performance computing (HPC) provides immense new capability to perform larger dry-lab experiments beyond available on-premise or chargeable cloud resources. In addition, HPC support introduces a new dimension in experiential learning by providing students with new opportunities to explore larger and more complex problems that are beyond typical textbook examples. The call aims to strengthen module delivery and education by leveraging unique and sought-after HPC resources. Teaching modules of interests include but are not limited to science and engineering (eg. in areas such as modelling & simulation), AI, machine learning and big data analytics. Possible uses of educational HPC resources include supporting lab exercises & projects in teaching modules, project-based modules and competitions like Datathons, among others.
2. Account Creation
- All staff and students from the following organisations can self-register for an NSCC account through the NSCC User Portal – A*STAR, NTU, NUS, SUTD, TCOMS, SMU, SP and TP.
- Staff and students from institutions not listed above may request for an account by filling in the NSCC IHLs Account Creation Form.
All IHL accounts will be granted with a personal quota upon account creation. Users may make use of this personal quota to familiarise themselves with NSCC’s system. The personal quota is fixed, non-transferable and cannot be extended. Once the personal quota is exceeded, you can only submit job through an approved project.
Currently, all staff and students from NSCC stakeholder organisations (A*STAR, NTU, NUS, SUTD, TCOMS, NEA) can register for an NSCC account granted with a personal quota of 100,000 core-hours and 50GB of storage.
Staff and students from non-stakeholder IHLs will be provided with an NSCC account granted with a personal quota of 10,000 core-hours and 50GB of storage.
3. Eligibility
This Call for Educational HPC Projects is an opportunity for all IHLs to request for additional HPC resource quotas of up to 1M core-hours and 0.1 TB of storage. To support graduate studies, graduate students can apply for resources to run large compute-intensive experiments. To help you get started on HPC resources, NSCC has developed a pool of user guides, supporting materials and training workshops on how to access and use NSCC’s resources.
- Eligible to all staff and students from the following local autonomous universities and polytechnics: NTU, NUS, SUTD, SMU, SIT, SUSS, NP, NYP, RP, SP and TP.
- Interested applicants from overseas IHLs or other pre-U institutes may collaborate with one of the IHLs as stated above. Note that the application must be made via the local IHL.
4. Type of Resources Available
- ASPIRE 1, a petascale supercomputer, which consists of 1,288 nodes of CPU and accelerator nodes with NVIDIA K40 GPUs
- AI System, which consists of 6 units of state-of-the-art 8-GPU NVIDIA DGX-1 with V100 cards. This system is meant for projects that focus on AI research with particular novelty on scale and/or throughput breakthrough
- 13PB of High Performance Storage
- Software: This Call for Projects will also take into account applicants’ software requirements. NSCC will consider installing open-source software if not already available in the system or facilitate the bulk procurement of popular commercially available HPC teaching and training software applications.
5. Applications
Applications will be reviewed by the Educational HPC Project Evaluation Committee (EPEC) comprising HPC experts from both academia and industry. Approved resources will have to be utilised within one year from the time of allocation, wherever possible.
For renewal of existing project:
Submit an application through the application form, indicating your existing 8-digit project ID in the form. Note that unutilised resources will not be brought forward to the new cycle. You will have to submit a deliverables report when submitting a renewal application through the Deliverables Report Submission Site.
6. Notification of Award
Details of the application result will be sent to all applicants via email.
7. Project Expiration
Projects that are not renewed will expire by the end of the project cycle. Renewal application should be submitted for project extending beyond the project end date.
- Project quota will be set to zero (0) hours and no jobs will be dispatched.
- All project data will remain in the system for one month.
- After one month, all project data will be archived.
- Charges will be incurred for retrieval of archived data at $0.022/GB.
- All archived data will be retained for 5 months from the date of archival (a total of 6 months from the end date of project).
Please plan your resource utilisation wisely and use your allocated resources as early as possible to avoid encountering resource bottlenecks towards the end of the project cycle.
8. Deliverables Update
Submit your deliverables report via the Deliverables Report Submission Site at the end of the project.
Note that:
- Users are required to update a brief report of deliverables achieved from utilising NSCC’s resources on the Projects Portal at the end of the project.
- Member(s) of accepted projects may be selected for an oral presentation, be required to do a poster presentation or submit a paper of their project at NSCC’s annual SupercomputingAsia (SCA) conference or its technical arm, Supercomputing Frontiers Asia (SCFA), in Singapore.
For further clarification on the above, please contact [email protected] and/or [email protected] for any further questions. We look forward to your applications.
Updated 14 March 2022
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