Getting Started
The Argonne and Oak Ridge leadership computing facilities have three programs by which they allocate time on the IBM BG/P “Intrepid” and Cray XT “Jaguar”: INCITE, ALCC, and Director’s Discretionary. The descriptions below will help you decide which program is the right one for you.
INCITE
The mission of the INCITE program is to enable high-impact, grand-challenge research that could not otherwise be performed without access to the leadership-class systems, Intrepid and Jaguar. This typically means that research teams can demonstrate effective use of Intrepid or Jaguar for production simulations, typically using up to twenty percent of the resource for single production runs. In other words, for the purpose of scientific or technological discovery, your research requires very, very large compute resources: for example, on the order of 40K processors.
INCITE has an annual call for proposals and dual review process that examines both computational readiness and potential for impact. The potential for impact has the greater weight factor in award decisions, so it is crucial to articulate how the proposed work may enable scientific discovery, technological breakthroughs, or change community perceptions. Awards are large in size: on average more than 20 million processor hours, with the largest awards exceeding 100 million hours. Sixty percent of the centers’ time is allocated via the INCITE program.
INCITE eligibility is very broad. Researchers around the world may apply for time: collaboration with U.S.-based researchers is encouraged but not required. Although the centers are funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, DOE funding is not a prerequisite for application.
Summary: INCITE is for researchers who need – and can effectively use – large scale compute resources for very high-impact research.
Director’s Discretionary
The OLCF and ALCF each allocate ten percent of their available resources on Jaguar and Intrepid through Director’s Discretionary programs. See the Related Links under Contact for specific details about requesting time.. Basically, the Director’s Discretionary program is a way for you to request access to the Jaguar or Intrepid systems in order to carry out porting, tuning, scaling, and other development work, typically in preparation for a future INCITE submittal. Researchers can also request time to carry out benchmarking, since INCITE requires benchmarking data carried out on Jaguar or Intrepid or a system of similar architecture. Typical awards of time are on the order of 1 million processor hours.
Researchers around the world may apply for Director’s Discretionary time. The most successful proposals demonstrate that the research team has a clear understanding of the requirements for petascale computing and have the resources to carry out the development work (for example, code modifications) required to make the transition to OLCF and ALCF leadership-class systems.
Summary: Director’s Discretionary is for researchers who are getting ready to submit an INCITE proposal, and need the time to prepare and tune their project for maximum effective use of the leadership systems at the OLCF and ALCF.
ALCC
The ALCC, or ASCR Leadership Computing Challenge, is a program managed by the U.S. Department of Energy. Through this program nearly thirty percent of the available time on Intrepid and Jaguar is allocated. The mission of the ALCC is to award time for special situations of interest to the Department with an emphasis on high-risk, high-payoff simulations in areas directly related to the Department’s energy mission in areas such as advancing the clean energy agenda and understanding the Earth’s climate, for national emergencies, or for broadening the community of researchers capable of using leadership computing resources. For additional information about this program, see the ALCC web site.
