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Advanced User Support

The information on this page applies to both the Notur and NorStore projects.

Scientists can apply for advanced user support projects. Advanced user support aims at helping scientists to improve or extend the performance and capabilities of their applications. This can be in a number of ways, including code parallelization, porting, optimization, benchmarking, improving user-interfaces, and software development. A main aim is also to achieve a better utilization of the (expensive) facilities in the national eInfrastructure.

Users can apply for advanced support by sending an application to UNINETT Sigma. Applications are evaluated by the Resource Allocation Committee appointed by the Research Council of Norway using criteria that are announced on these pages. Certain calls for applications target specific topics. Applications will be ranked according to the objectives of the call.

Objectives

The advanced user support activity is first and foremost driven by user needs. The activity has the following high-level objectives:

  • Enable researchers to focus more on science
  • Increase the quality and rate of scientific results
  • Enable better utilization of expensive or scarce resources
  • The results of advanced support must have a long-term effect

The activity gives priority to support of leading-edge research and strategic applications areas. The Notur and NorStore projects encourage the deployment of environments that incorporate both research and development work. Synergies between IT-centers and research environments should be exploited. Long-term cooperation can be established by shared financing of personnel. The publication of results from advanced user support projects at conferences or in journals is strongly encouraged.

The advanced support activity is directed towards user applications and assists users in improving the efficiency and usability of their programs. The activity provides qualified personnel in computational science and scientific computing with good skills in programming, parallel programming and program optimization.

A typical project for advanced support can provide:

  • support for applications and databases that are of importance for a number of years,
  • support for (existing) users with large needs for computation and storage,
  • support for (new) users that are not familiar with the supercomputing facilities,
  • support for the coordination of related applications and databases,
  • support for complex application enabling.

Examples of projects are performance analysis and optimization of application software, (improving) the scalability of applications and improving the usability of application programs and integration of data access and management tools.

The advanced support activity does not fund:

  • research projects. Instead, advanced support targets software engineering and software development tasks that are of direct benefit to research activity.
  • tasks that are considered regular user support. Advanced support targets activity that requires skilled or specific competence that is not covered by the ordinary (basic) help-desk support of the Metacenter.
  • local staff. Instead, advanced support provides assistance with qualified personnel in computational science and scientific computing with good skills in programming, software development, code optimization and complex application enabling.

Who can apply?

Applicants for advanced user support should be responsible for an on-going project on the Notur and/or NorStore resources or have the intention to become responsible for such project. Read more about who can apply.

Who should apply?

Advanced user support is meant for scientists with compute- and data-intensive applications as well as scientists that start using the resources in the national infrastructure. Advanced user support aims at helping scientists to improve or extend the computational performance and capabilities of their applications. Advanced user support is also for scientists that have a need for high-end resources but that are unfamiliar with parallel computing architectures and parallel programming languages. The advanced support activity in principle only targets software applications on the Notur compute resources and NorStore data resources, but exceptions to this may be possible.

Evaluation criteria

Evaluation criteria for proposals are:

  • Clarity, completeness and quality of the proposal.
  • The (expected) impact of the proposed activity on addressing the scientific challenge, on the relevant user community at large, as well as on application software, in terms of performance, functionality and/or usability.
  • Feasibility and risk assessment, in particular with respect to timely and successful completion of the project.
  • The in-kind or cash contribution to support the staff that will complete the proposed activity.

In addition, it is expected that the applicant performs the necessary preparatory work (before proposal submission) to understand the type of work required and quantify the person effort that is applied for. For example, a proposal to improve the scalability of a (parallel) application should demonstrate that a performance analysis has been carried out in which the bottlenecks were identified that need to be addressed in the proposed activity.

To prepare a proposal, it is strongly recommended that the applicant establishes a working relation with qualified staff that can (and is willing to) carry out the proposed activity. During proposal preparation, UNINETT Sigma can help with finding qualified staff.

Call for applications 2012

The call (2012) for advanced application support can be found here.

Advanced user support projects 2003-2011

Information about calls in 2003-2011 can be found via the following links: