NSCC Call for Project Application

1. Overview
2. Eligibility & Requirement
3. Account Creation
4. Project Application
5. Resource Approval Criteria
6. After Project Approval
7. Project Expiration

Cycle	Application Period	Resource Allocation Period	Status
Jan’19	21 Sep – 19 Oct 2018 (CLOSED)	1 Jan 2019 to 31 Dec 2019	Ongoing
Jul’19	4 Mar – 5 Apr 2019 (CLOSED)	1 Jul 2019 to 30 Jun 2020	Ongoing
Jan’20	2 Sep – 30 Sep 2019 (Tentative)	1 Jan 2020 to 31 Dec 2020
Jul’20	March 2020	1 Jul 2020 to 30 Jun 2021

1. Overview

In July 2017, the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore officially started allocating resources on a per-project basis for users who require resources beyond the personal quota of 50 GB storage and 100,000 CPU core hours for NSCC ASPIRE 1.

NSCC is also pleased to announce the deployment of the new [email protected] Platform. This platform is deployed in support of AI Singapore (AISG), a national programme set up in May 2017 to drive AI adoption, research and innovation in Singapore. NSCC officially starts allocating resources on a per-project basis for resources on the NSCC AI System, a system consisting of six DGX-1 nodes meant for projects that focus on AI research, with the particular novelty on scale and/or throughput breakthrough.

Learn more about the ASPIRE 1 and AI System here.

2. Eligibility & Requirement

• Project calls are only eligible for applicants from stakeholder organisations.
• The applicant should be the Principal Investigator (PI) or the supervisor of the project. If required, the PI may authorise a team member to submit the application on their behalf.
• The applicant will be contact person for project approval, updates, and management of the project users and resources.
• Please take note that member/s of accepted projects may be selected for an oral presentation or be required to do a poster presentation of their project at NSCC’s annual Supercomputing Asia (SCA) conference in Singapore. 

3. Account Creation

• Users from stakeholder organisations: apply for an account now at https://user.nscc.sg.
• Please refer to the User Enrollment Guide for more information.
• Users from non-stakeholder organisations: please write to [email protected] for more information.

4. Project Application

• Submit your application on the Projects Portal when the application period opens.
• All resources, if approved, will be for a 1-year period.
• You should receive a confirmation email once your application has been submitted successfully.
• All applications that are not submitted will be deleted at the end of the application period. (Renewal applications will be reverted to their previous status).
• Please refer to the Projects Portal User Guide for more information.
• For ASPIRE 1: Resources requested should be at least 50,000 CPU core hours.
• For AI System: Projects must focus on AI research.

5. Resource Approval Criteria

The project allocations are reviewed by the Policy & Resource Allocation Committee (PRAC) and Technical Resource Allocation Committee (TRAC) with representatives from the NSCC stakeholders and AI Singapore (for the AI System), based on scientific merits and technical feasibility.

For all project applications, the criteria for resource approval includes:

• Scientific merits of the project
• Quality and completeness of the application
• Expected deliverables (e.g. number of patents, publications and postgraduate students etc.)
• Track record of applicant (based on resources utilisation and deliverables achieved for previously approved projects, if any.)

For project renewals, applications will be reviewed for the following:

• Project’s resource usage (Please note that if the previously granted resources have less than 70% utilisation, the new resource requests may be subjected to reduction)
• Deliverables achieved

6. After Project Approval

• The applicant will be notified of the project approval status before the start of the resource allocation period.
• Projects that have been granted resources are obliged to acknowledge NSCC in any published work. A sample of the text can be found in the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP); which details can be found below.

Citation: All academic journal or conference papers shall cite NSCC with the following:

“The computational work for this article was (fully/partially) performed on resources of the National Supercomputing Centre, Singapore (https://www.nscc.sg).”

• For requests of additional resources after project approval, please email [email protected] with the following details:

1. Project ID
2. New resource request requested
3. Reasons for the new request (e.g. how was the resources used, applications used etc.)
4. Calculations of the requested resource
5. Utilisation plan over the remaining months till the end of the project cycle
6. Deliverables achieved as of now

Additional resources should only be requested after the depletion of the approved resources within the resource allocation period.

Please note that requests made outside the project allocation calls will be reviewed by the Resource Allocation Committee within 2 weeks to 3 months depending on the scale of the request.

7. Project Expiration

Projects that are not renewed will expire by the end of the 1-year project cycle. Renewal application should be submitted for project extending beyond a year.

• Project quota will be set to zero (0) hours and no jobs will be dispatched.
• All project data will remain in the system for 31 days.
• After 31 days, 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.

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.

Updated 5 July 2019