NERSC Award Types

Three types of awards are made:

1. DOE Production Awards
2. INCITE Awards
3. SC Director Awards
4. Startup Awards

1. DOE Production Awards

These awards are for production-ready projects that receive direct grant support from the DOE Office of Science or whose research reflects the mission of DOE's Office of Science. SciDAC projects are included in this category; there are no longer separate SciDAC awards.

DOE Production awards are made by the Office of Science Allocation Managers and DOE's Supercomputing Advisory Committee.

2. INCITE Awards

Ten percent of NERSC's computational resources are set aside for Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) projects, which are competed in a separate process. See INCITE Call for Proposals and INCITE at NERSC.

3. SC Director Awards

Ten percent of NERSC's computational resources are set aside for the director of the Office of Science to make awards to meet special mission needs.

4. Startup Awards

These are awards for PIs who wish to investigate using NERSC resources for new projects, or who wish to port or develop new codes. The maximum Startup award is 50,000 IBM POWER3-equivalent hours (for 2008 startup awards) or 15,000 Cray XT4-equivalent hours (for 2009 startup awards) and 10,000 Storage Resource Units. A request for a Startup repository can be made at any time during the year, and decisions for Startup requests are made by NERSC within one to three weeks after applying. Startup requests require only brief answers to the Code Description and Data questions on the ERCAP request form.

Startup awards are valid for up to 18 months (although they need to be renewed for a new allocation year), after which time the PI must apply for a DOE production award. Production projects are expected to have codes that can effectively use hundreds to thousands of processors.