Information about Wyoming-NCAR Alliance Allocations

There will be two types of allocations: start-up or educational allocations, and large computing allocations.  Requests for the use of the Wyoming portion of NWSC computational resources should address challenging science problems in the atmospheric and related sciences requiring capability computing, contribute to cross-disciplinary research in the geosciences and Earth System sciences, and help attain the goals of fostering substantive scientific and computational collaborations between UW and NCAR, EPSCoR state, or front-range researchers.

The next Large Allocation requests for resources are due May 15, 2013. Awards will be made in mid-June, with projects able to start by early July.

Large Computing Allocations.

All large computing allocations will be reviewed by the Wyoming Resource Allocations Panel (WRAP). Large computing proposal requests for the use of WNA must:

1.   Have scientific merit;

If a proposal has been peer-reviewed and has received an NSF or other Federal agency grant, then it will be deemed to have scientific merit. Proposals funded by a Wyoming State agency are subject to review processes conducted by UW and the State agency and, if approved for funding by the State agency, will be deemed to have scientific merit.

Requests without merit-reviewed support will have their scientific merit reviewed by the allocation committee, in addition to the computational merit. If the WRAP co-chairs feel the WRAP does not have sufficient expertise in the field in question, the WRAP co-chairs shall solicit external reviews of the science to determine scientific merit.

2.   Focus on research or support HPC curricula related to Earth System Science areas  that  are of substantial interest to the                 Wyoming-NCAR Alliance.

     3.   Include UW researchers as PI or co-PI of the qualifying grant or, in the event of  unfunded projects, as principal collaborator in       the scientific activity. 

List of eligible areas

List of UW researchers using scientific computing in eligible areas

Start-up and Educational Allocations.

UW graduate students and post-docs, and UW faculty working towards creating data, testing algorithms, etc., for a future grant proposal, or small allocations in support of a funded scientific project are eligible to apply for a start-up allocation. Startup and educational requests will be reviewed by the WRAP co-chairs upon submission. No panel review is needed for a start-up request, and such a request can usually be accommodated within a few business days.

The use of high-performance computing in undergraduate and graduate courses at UW is encouraged, and accounts can be provided to individual students and the UW professor for assignments involving numerical simulations, modeling, and use of recently developed computational architecture. Faculty needing to use of the Wyoming resource for an undergraduate or graduate course they are teaching should send e-mail to alloc@uwyo.edu describing the anticipated software needs, storage and computing usage prior to the start of the semester the course is taught.