Introduction
Organisations that are not members of the Centre for Innovation (CfI) may request access to the EMERALD and IRIDIS services in order to perform activities using resources they would not have available locally.
The purpose of this form is to capture the technical requirements of the work you wish to undertake on either HPC facilities. Applications received through this route will be reviewed by appropriate Service Group to ensure that the resources required are sufficient, and the selected architecture appropriate, to the work proposed.
Given the above, the principal review criteria will be:
 The need for the resource – why this work cannot be conducted locally within your own organisation;

Feasibility – Does the code proposed work efficiently on the chosen architecture or has development work been undertaken to improve scalability of the chosen code;

Timescales – What length of time and level of resource is required;

Funding – do you have funding to pay for the use of the chosen system.
Background Information and Process
Background information on the CfI and the HPC services available is available at http://www.cfi.ses.ac.uk/ . You can direct general or specific technical queries via the
Contact Us page http://www.cfi.ses.ac.uk/contact/
Once you have completed the form, please submit to support@ses.ac.uk
. You will be contacted regarding any queries concerning your submission in due course and we aim to respond to you with a firm decision within two weeks of receipt of your submission.
Please note that although we will endeavour to respond to your access request and queries as soon as possible please note that the helpdesk working hours are Monday to Friday 9am-
5pm excluding Bank Holidays. As such, if your access request has a hard time constraint or requires a faster than usual turnaround time please make us aware of this in your application to us.
Your commitment to us
On accepting access to the resources requested you will commit as part of the access agreement to complete a short report or Case Study (1 page minimum) no more than one month after your work on the system has been completed. The information will be used to update us on the outcomes of your project, inform future consortium developments and to make us aware of any follow-on requirements you may have concerning the facilities. Your
Case Study may be published as part of the promotional activities to demonstrate CfI capabilities. Personal contact details submitted with your application will not be forwarded or used by any 3rd parties. Use of your personal information will be limited to your interest and use of the CfI systems only.
Page 1 of 5

Project Information Overview.
1.1 Project Title:
1.2 System Requested
EMERALD / IRIDIS / Both (please delete as appropriate)
1.3 Project Support
(if the resources are being requested to support a current project at your organisation please
indicate the source of overall project support and funding)
(i) UK Research Council (ii) Charity (iii) Governmental department (iv) Internal (v) Other
(vi) No current funding (please delete as appropriate)
1.4 Project Outline
Please give a brief explanation of the work you propose to conduct on the above system(s)
clearly stating the objectives and anticipated outcomes of the project
1.5 Need for access to Centre for Innovation resources
Please provide a brief explanation of the need for the requested system(s)
1.6 Primary contact / PI Name and Contact Details.
Name:
Nationality:
Department:
Institution:
Position held:
Address:
Postcode: e-mail:
Telephone Fax
1.7 Alternate Contact Details (to whom queries about this application should be
addressed if not the above)
Name:
Nationality:
Department:
Institution:
Page 2 of 5

Position held:
Address:
Postcode: e-mail:
Telephone Fax
1.8 Expected Number of direct participants in this project users:
0 / 1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5 / >5 (please delete as appropriate)
Details will be required for additional participants if your application is successful
Proposed Start Date
(dd/mm/yy):
2. Previous Use of HPC Resources.
Duration
(mnths:wks):
What systems, have you previously used, or are currently using, for your HPC work. Please provide a brief summary of the system, jobs run on this system in terms of numbers of processes, memory and runtime and any other optimisation/code development work
relevant to your use of the resources you are requesting.
3. Software and Support Requirements.
3.1 What is (are) the main code(s) you will be using?
Please supply the names of any codes along with any relevant web sites or other references,
and describe if you will be modifying these codes in any way.
3.2 What software provided by the EMERALD and IRIDIS services are you expecting to
use? Include details of compilers, libraries, packages, debuggers and other tools.
3.3 What (if any) additional software will you need installed, or plan to install for your
own use? Please include references to relevant web pages etc that describe the software
you will be using.
3.4 Are there any licence requirements or additional costs for any of the above software?
If yes, please detail costs and terms of licence agreements? Please note that the Centre for
Innovation cannot provide financial support for the provision of licences to non-consortium
Page 3 of 5

members)
4.0
Resource Utilisation
4.1 If requesting access to IRIDIS can your code make use of all cores on each node?
Note: Each IRIDIS node is composed of two, six-core, 2.4 GHz Westmere processors accessing 22GB memory.
Yes / No / Don’t Know (Please delete as appropriate)
If your answer is “No”, please provide details (below) as to why you will be using fewer cores per node.
4.2 If requesting access to EMERALD can your code make use of more than one GPU processor in a node?
Yes / No / Don’t Know (Please delete as appropriate)
If your answer to the above is “No”, please provide details as to why.
4.3 Projected Utilisation Summary
Largest Job
Number of (MPI) processes.
Number of processes used per node
Wallclock time for each job.
Number of jobs of this type
Total memory required
Amount of data read/written to disk in each job.
Typical Job Smallest Job
4.4 Resources Required
Please complete the table below detailing the compute resources that you require based upon the anticipated job mix you have detailed above. Please also estimate the storage required, giving separate figures for the /home and /work space you will require for the duration of your project.
IRIDIS Compute Resource EMERALD Compute Resource
Page 4 of 5

Request Request
Computing Resource
(CPUh / GPUh)
Storage (TB) /home
Storage (TB) /work
Archive resources are limited on both systems. Suitable arrangements should be made to transfer data offsite during and shortly after (< 3 months) your project has completed.
Page 5 of 5