NHR application rules – NHR@FAU
Since January 2021, NHR@FAU is one of now nine centers of the NHR Alliance.
The final rules and workflows for applying for an NHR project / account are not yet fully fixed within the alliance. There will be a joint portal of all NHR centers for compute time applications. Nevertheless, you’ll find our preliminary local conditions below.
Contacting NHR@FAU
You can reach NHR@FAU by email to hpc-support@fau.de. Reachability by phone cannot be guaranteed as many of us are still partially working from at home.
Individual consulting using Zoom, BigBlueButton, or DFN-Conf can be arranged on short notice. Just send us an email to hpc-support@fau.de.
Offerings of NHR@FAU
Scientific offerings
NHR@FAU is offering support especially in the area of performance engineering and single-node performance analysis. The application focus is on atomistic simulations, i.e. molecular dynamics, chemistry, and certain areas of material sciences. Special experience is in particular available from Gromacs and Amber.
Compute resources
NHR@FAU is offering two different types of compute resources:
- GPGPU cluster “Alex” with Nvidia A40 and Nvidia A100 GPGPUs
- Parallel computer “Fritz” with Intel Xeon Platium 8360Y “IceLake” processors and HDR100 interconnect within islands of 64 nodes (i.e. 4.608 cores)
Types of projects at NHR@FAU
Regular projects by default have a duration of 12 month. The review process typically takes less than 3 months. Test / porting projects will be decided within 3-4 weeks.
Details of the resource limits listed in the table are still subject to change.
| Type of project | Possible resources on “Alex” | Possible resources on “Fritz” | Type of review | Remarks |
| test / porting project (typical project runtime not more than 3-4 months) |
up to 3.000 GPU hours (A40 or A100) | up to 500.000 core hours |
|
Rolling call.
A scientific advisor from NHR@FAU (liaison scientist) is recommended. |
| normal compute time projects for granted DFG or BMBF projects |
|
1 – 10 mio core hours |
|
Rolling call.
A scientific advisor from NHR@FAU (liaison scientist) can be requested |
| normal compute time projects built without granted DFG or BMBF projects |
|
1 – 10 mio core hours |
|
Rolling call.
A scientific advisor from NHR@FAU (liaison scientist) can be requested. |
| large compute time projects |
|
10 – 30 mio core hours |
|
Deadlines for large-scale applications: January / April / July / October 1st.
A scientific advisor from NHR@FAU (liaison scientist) is mandatory. |
| follow-up projects | as above | as above |
|
a scientific advisor from NHR@FAU (liaison scientist) can be requested |
Projects falling into the “large compute time projects” category should also consider applying for compute time at one of the three federal Tier1 HPC centers of the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS).
Template for NHR@FAU compute time application proposals
During the course of the year 2022, a central online application portal hopefully will be come operational. For now, please use our template for NHR@FAU compute time proposals and send it by email from your university account to hpc-support@fau.de.
The document contains detailed information on what to fill in. Depending on the project type, some sections are optional and the expected length of some sections may also vary; see the notes in the document for details and contact us via hpc-support@fau.de for further assistance.
Acknowledgement of NHR@FAU
Please use the following formulation for acknowledging the resources and the support provided by NHR@FAU:
The authors gratefully acknowledge the scientific support and HPC resources provided by the Erlangen National High Performance Computing Center (NHR@FAU) of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) under the NHR project <ID of your NHR@FAU project>. NHR funding is provided by federal and Bavarian state authorities. NHR@FAU hardware is partially funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) – 440719683.
Please also send electronic copies of these publications by email to nhr-redaktion@lists.fau.de. Proper acknowledgements of our services is important for our center’s evaluation and its future funding.