My name is Harald Larnick.

I'm working at the Energi FAU administrative office and I'm responsible for the application

process and this is the reason I want to tell you in this HPC Cafe something about how to apply

for HPC resources and in particularly how to use YARDS, the application platform that NHR decided

to use for all the centers. So I'm sure you know that Erlangen is one of in total nine NHR centers

which form the NHR alliance and this alliance which is called in Germany the NHR Verein or

NHR Consortium not only provides HPC resources it also provides scientific and technical support

for the applicants and it cares about performance optimization of the applications the applicants

use. Yeah and the good news is that these NHR resources are open to researchers at German

universities so they're with an affiliation in Germany and they are free of charge so you can

use it for free. If you need detailed information about what resources are provided

please refer to the website which is given here which explains quite nicely what are the

different properties and the different aspects to get computing time. So the application for

resources is now available through this central YARDS portal and this acronym YARDS stands for

joint application review and dispatch service which was developed or has been developed since

2014 at the Jülich supercomputer centers and there's one important point to mention in advance

and researchers have to be clear or have to make a choice in advance which NHR center

to use or at which NHR center to apply for and which project category to apply for but we will

see this in a few minutes. So this is the central entry point for the YARDS system which is adapted

especially for the needs of NHR. Of course behind such an application there's a peer review process

that means the scientific quality and the need for tier two resources must be proven in the application

and good news is that there is a simplified review process for projects which have been

already reviewed by DFG, BNBF or other institutions with scientific review process in behind.

Okay what are project types you can apply here in Erlangen? So we have different types which can be

classified according to the resources you want to apply for. We have to offer GPU and CPU core hours

and you see there are tests or starting projects with quite limited resources which are good for

supporting your application to an HPC system or simply check how the HPC or the parallel performance

of your application is on such a system. For these type of projects only a technical review

is necessary which means that if you apply after a few days two to three working days or so

you get access to the HPC system and can immediately start with your calculations

or with your tests. The normal way or the normal application type is a so-called normal project

which you can see here and which gives you a reasonable amount of GPU and CPU resources

and for this normal project case you normally need not only a technical review but also a

scientific review. To be exact here we need two scientific reviews and these two scientific reviews

of course need some time and therefore people decided that we can use the option that often

applicants have a DFG or BNBF grant for which they want to use HPC resources so if your project is

already peer reviewed then we can simplify this process that only a technical review is necessary

and no scientific reviews anymore but only a careful check of the resources and the methods

you want to use for your project. You can apply at every time this is a so-called rolling call

which means you can submit at every time and this is the main difference to the last project

category which are the large scale projects shown here. So of course the scale is larger you can

apply for more CPU or GPU resources but here it is mandatory that you need to or that we have to

ask for two scientific reviews and the technical review and because this needs more time

this is no rolling call here there are four calls in total so every quarter

there is a deadline and there are only these projects start only at four times per year

so first January, April, September and July and October. So here in Erlangen we have to use the

central application platform YARDS now mandatory for large scale and starter projects but they may

be used also for the other available categories but for large scale and starter it's now a must.

The entry point I've already shown you to you but the good news or I think it's quite good news is

that you can still apply for tests or porting and normal projects locally by our well-established