Submission deadline: November 13th, 2016

In this call, PASC is seeking proposals for HPC software development projects that address the performance challenges on both current and newly emerging supercomputing platforms, both at node level and at scale. Eligible projects must be tied to application software that is related to important scientific problems that require high-end supercomputers to be solved. While exploration of novel programming languages and environments is encouraged, projects should ascertain that the software runs on commonly supported software environments.

Project teams should be interdisciplinary, consisting of researchers from the relevant application domains, computational science and applied mathematics, as well as computer science. The organization of the interactions between project members of the various disciplines and participating institutions should be clearly described in the project proposal. Ideally, interactions between different disciplines and institutions are a straightforward consequence of the work breakdown structure of the project. The products of these projects is software. Open-source developments, for example with publicly available source repositories, will be favored. Licensing models should be discussed and justified in the proposal.

Adoption of test driven development is encouraged and use of automated unit and regression testing technologies with emphasis on reproducibility is mandatory. Proposals have to discuss their plans for support of the software beyond the duration of this project.

Researchers with tenured positions at Swiss universities and institutes of the ETH Domain are eligible to submit HPC software development projects as principal investigators (PI). SNSF rules for personnel eligibility apply.

Projects will start on July 1, 2017 and will have to be concluded by June 30, 2020 at the latest. Expected project duration will be two to three years. The initial budget allocation for this call for PASC HPC software development projects is CHF 5 million. PASC expects to support around 10 projects.

Proposals have to be submitted before midnight Central European Time on November 13, 2016 in PDF format via email to projectoffice@pasc-ch.org.

Submitted proposals will first be subject to eligibility check by the program secretariat. Eligible proposals will subsequently be evaluated by external peers and ranked by the PASC Scientific Advisory Board. Final decision on funding will be adopted by the PASC Steering Committee upon proposition of the PASC Program Director. Final decision is expected in March 2017.