A total of 31 A2 projects were approved in the 3rd edition of the Advanced Computing Projects Competition.
Applications for types A0 and A1 are open until May 31st.
The FCT, through its FCCN Unit, publishes the provisional results of type A2 – Project or Regular Access from the 3rd edition of the Advanced Computing Projects Competition with the approval of 31 projects computational resources in type A2 – Regular or Project Access. In total, approximately 36 M core hours, 23,000 GPU hours, and 760 TB of storage are allocated. With a 60% approval rate, the FCT will thus support projects that require computing tools with a total economic value of around €450,000.
You 31 projects will be developed by teams with consolidated and demonstrated prior experience in advanced computing on one of the platforms National Advanced Computing Network (RNCA).
This edition featured a new access method – Virtual Research Environments or Virtual Research Environments (VRE) – to meet the needs of collaboration between researchers from one or more organizations through cloud computing. From the universe of 31 projects approved, 3 will be developed in VREs, 27 will have access to High Performance Computing (HPC) and 1 project will combine HPC with Cloud Computing (SCC). They are around 20 institutions supported national, including a national R&D company that develops innovative renewable energy solutions offshore.
Teams have 12 months to execute HPC and SCC projects or 24 months for VRE projects in one of the national platforms – Advanced Computing Laboratory of the University of Coimbra (LCA-UC), High Performance Computing of the University of Évora (HPC-UÉ) and the National Infrastructure for Distributed Computing (INCD). These centers provide the user community with various computing services (HPC, HTC, Cloud, and others, particularly in terms of technological capacity) with the aim of supporting applications in various fields, such as bioinformatics, climate, materials and life sciences, computational chemistry, physics, and civil engineering, among others, boosting the competitiveness of national research and innovation activities.
The approved projects cover all scientific domains with the following distribution:
- Physics and Mathematics – 23%
- Chemistry and Materials – 26%
- Life Sciences – 19%
- Engineering and Technology – 13%
- Earth and Environmental Sciences – 13%
- Social Sciences – 6%
The following demographic data are also highlighted:
- 74% of the responsible researchers are male and only 26% are female.
- Around 20 national institutions from various regions of the country, including the islands.
The Advanced Computing competitions have supported to date more than 300 computational projects of a hundred national institutions, including the autonomous regions of the Azores and Madeira, and would allocate more than 100 M CPU core hours or vCPU hours. There are more than 50 scientific publications and 60 Master's or Doctoral theses associated with projects approved within the scope of these competitions.
Applications for types A1 and A0 remain open until May 31, 2023 (1 p.m., Lisbon time).
More information at FCT page and in the RNCA website.
