Application Support in High Performance Computing

The call aims for the establishment and four-year operation of a distributed European-wide HPC application support service. The selected project should bring together Application Support Teams (AST) established (primarily) in current or future EuroHPC Hosting Entities, operating the EuroHPC supercomputers.

By the end of the action, an effective application support team network across EuroHPC stakeholders (primarily Hosting Entities) will have been established providing services to European HPC users from public and private sector including SMEs. This network will provide a knowledge hub for HPC offering a comprehensive support service from porting, optimisation and execution of key applications as well as training and development of specialised cross-domain support material that will facilitate EuroHPC system exploitation and delivery of excellent scientific results.

Background

EuroHPC Joint Undertaking is deploying a European-wide High Performance Computing infrastructure, comprising a number of supercomputers that range from small petascale, to large high-end pre-exascale and exascale systems. These supercomputers provide state of the art HPC capabilities topping the relevant global rankings. The systems are operated by supercomputing centres, referred to as Hosting Entities, which have been selected by the EuroHPC JU through Calls of Expression of Interest and have signed a Hosting Agreement with the JU. 

Part of the responsibilities of the Hosting Entities, is the provision of support services to users that are selected by EuroHPC to access the systems by allocating them computing resources under the conditions established in the EuroHPC Access Policy. These services are currently limited primarily to Level 1 support which mostly entails a helpdesk support for day-by-day operational issues and problems. In some cases, a Level 2 support is provided for a short period of time which comprises guidelines how to complete a basic porting of their code, how to prepare the environment and how to perform their first runs on the system. This offering is on best effort basis and subject to human resources availability from the side of the Hosting Entity. EuroHPC wishes to ameliorate this by establishing a high-level specialised application support service. Through this improved service offering, EuroHPC is aiming for the best possible uptake of the systems by European scientist and researchers with a knock-on effect to the quality of scientific results and the overall positive impact in the European HPC domain.

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