The NERSC Allocation Request Form (ERCAP)¶

Allocation requests are made via a web form known as the ERCAP (Energy Research Computing Allocations Process) Request Form. Initial requests to use NERSC resources can be submitted at any time. Renewals for approved projects are required annually.

Preparing an ERCAP Request¶

To start, point your browser to https://ercap.nersc.gov and log in. You will now be at the ERCAP requests dashboard, which is reproduced in the below image.

You can now create a new project, renew a current project, or continue work on a draft request.

• To create a new project, click on the blue "Request a New Project 20XX" button. Be sure to select the proper Allocation Year when you fill out the ERCAP form -- there may be two blue buttons to choose from at certain times of year.
• To renew a current project, click on the green "Request a Project Renewal for 20XX" button -- this will enable the pre-filling of some form questions, based on your existing project / previous ERCAP request. Be sure to select the proper allocation year -- there may be two green buttons to choose from at certain times of the year.
• To continue work on a draft request you (or a collaborator) started earlier, find your request in the "Draft Requests" section of the dashboard. Choose the request to continue editing by clicking its ERCAP Number link.

Navigating the ERCAP Form¶

The ERCAP form consists of a header for broad information about the project, plus some tabs for more specific information.

Form features¶

• Gray boxes cannot be edited.
• Boxes and tabs with red stars indicate that required information needs to be provided.
• Hovering your mouse over the labels of the boxes provides additional information about what is needed.

Searching through text¶

In any field with a "magnifying glass" to the right of the field, you can view a short list by typing in two asterisks, or filter the list by entering a word or phrase. You can also bring up a full list in a pop-up window by clicking on the magnifying glass. Once you have the full list, you can further search on a word or phrase.

Look up a request to renew¶

For a renewal request, first ensure that the checkbox next to "This request is a renewal." is checked. (This is automatic if you selected the green renewal button, but can also be selected manually after the fact in a new project request.) Then, click on the magnifying glass icon next to the "ERCAP Number of Request to Renew" field. A pop-up window will show a list of your previous requests that are available to be renewed. Click on the ERCAP number link to select the request.

Saving your work¶

Click the "Save as Draft" button at the top right to save your progress.

Submitting for review¶

Click the "Submit for Review" button at the top right to submit your allocation request. After you submit the request, you cannot edit it anymore. If you find an error, please contact NERSC Allocations, who can either make a correction on your behalf, or release the request back to you for you to fix.

Answering questions in the form¶

Project Title and Label¶

Please choose a project title that succinctly describes your project, suitable for display in award lists and in NERSC's Annual Report. The NERSC Project Title is not required to match the title of any existing DOE grant or project. The title is limited to 256 characters; shorter titles are preferable (100 or fewer characters). In summary, the title should be short and descriptive.

Also choose a short project label (10 characters maximum) that uniquely identifies your project. It is usually used in lists and reports where including the entire Project Title is too long or cumbersome. Examples of such project names are "MPICH" (for the project that supports MPICH software development) and "STAR" (for the project that analyzes data from the STAR experiment). If you wish, you may use a repository name as your project name.

Principal Investigator¶

The Principal Investigator, commonly referred to as the PI, is responsible for the project and for managing any resources awarded to the project. The PI is usually one of the PIs on a grant listed on the Funding tab.

If your project has multiple PIs, please pick one to be the NERSC PI. Other PIs can be listed as Senior Investigators under the Personnel tab.

Project Class¶

Choose one of the following:

• DOE Mission Science: for projects that support science of interest to one of the DOE Offices of Science programs, or the SBIR program. This is the project class for the majority of projects at NERSC.
• Director Reserve Project: for projects answering specific calls for proposals put out by NERSC, such as "Science at Scale" or "QIS@NERSC", or by prior arrangement with NERSC managment.
• Education: for projects that support teaching related to High Performance Computing.
• Exploratory: for PIs who wish to investigate using NERSC resources for new projects, or who wish to port or develop new codes. The maximum Exploratory awards are 250 Node hours and 1 TB of archival storage space in HPSS. In the next field, you must select the DOE Office of Science program that you received your funding from or that will be overseeing your research in the future.

Program¶

Select the DOE Program to review your request. Some (but not all) programs will provide allocations to requests for research not funded by DOE. Education projects should select "NERSC DDR - NERSC Education", and Director Reserve projects should select the matching call for proposals.

Science Category¶

Select the Science Category that best categorizes your project. You can search through the entire list of Science Categories, or you can reduce your search by entering a significant term to see the categories that contain that term.

Personnel Tab¶

Senior Investigators¶

Senior Investigators are the key contributors in your project. Please list them by name, organization, email address.

Authorized Preparers¶

A Principal Investigator can designate one or more Authorized Preparers who help to fill out the ERCAP request form. You can add an Authorized Preparer to your ERCAP request by searching the available NERSC users. You can start the search by typing in the person's name in the Search field or by clicking on the magnifying glass for a more advanced search.

Funding Tab¶

Click on the checkbox next to ALL of the entities that provide funding for your project. Once you click on a checkbox, you will be asked to provide additional information.

DOE Office of Science funding¶

• Funding Office
• Funding Program Manager: If your Program manager is not listed, use the "Not Listed" option.
• DOE/SC Grant, PAMS, and/or FWP numbers
• DOE SC Program managers

Federal Agency other than DOE/SC¶

These are grants supported by areas of DOE outside the Office of Science (e.g., Office of Nuclear Energy, Science, and Technology; Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy) and other federal agencies (e.g., NASA, NSF, NOAA, etc.). You can select more than one Federal Agency. Be sure to identify which agency each grant number is from.

Other funding options¶

• LDRD Funding
• State or local government or agency
• Foreign government or agency
• University
• Non-profit Organization
• Other

For projects not funded by DOE/SC, please describe the project's relevance to one of the DOE Office of Science programs and the mission of that program.

PLEASE NOTE: The purpose of this section is to state how the goals of your project overlap with or align with the mission of the DOE Office of Science. Your request will be evaluated partly on the basis of alignment with a DOE program mission. Find one of the mission statements and give just two or three sentences stating how and why your work is related to it. You will have ample opportunity to describe your project's overall importance and impact in the Project Details Tab. Please do not include that information here.

Security Tab¶

NERSC supports only open research intended to be published in open scientific journals. Purely proprietary research is not allowed.

In addition, NERSC does not allow the use of the following:

• Classified or controlled military or defense information
• Export controlled or ITAR (International Traffic in Arms Regulations) information
• Personally identifiable information
• Protected health information

You must select one of the two options: "I attest that this project adheres to these guidelines", or "I request an exception to these policies, based on the following:". If you select the latter option, you will be given a text box to explain your answer. If necessary, NERSC will contact you for more information.

Project Details Tab¶

Summary and Goals¶

Please provide a succinct description of your project that is suitable for the general public (i.e., at a Scientific American level of sophistication). This description should emphasize what the project expects to accomplish and the significance of the work.

Detailed Description¶

Provide a more technically detailed explanation of your research for review by the DOE managers.

Website URL¶

All projects should provide a project URL; these are useful in obtaining additional information about a project (e.g., when responding to queries for information).

Additional Fields Required for Renewal Requests¶

Accomplishments Summary¶

Summarize in non-technical terms the accomplishments made by this project using NERSC resources in the previous year. Explain why your results are important and how the use of NERSC resources allowed you to meet your research objectives. This is optional for Educational and new Exploratory requests.

You can include a long, technical description of your project's accomplishments as a PDF document to upload. Find the paperclip at the top of the page to attach a document.

Refereed Publications¶

List all refereed publications in the last 12 months based on research using NERSC resources. You may include publications that are accepted and are in press, or published in journals but not publications in preparation. Do not include publications that were entered here last year. Please indicate if your article was highlighted on a journal cover.

Enter in the order: authors, title, journal, DOI. The DOI is the single most important item because we can look up the publication information from the DOI.

Please do not dump information from LaTeX into this area! Ideally you will enter all information as plain text.

Non-refereed Publications¶

Here you may include publications that have been submitted but not yet published, as well as non refereed publications.

Resources Tab¶

Enter only integers in the fields for the various resources requested (no commas or decimal points). Characters will be removed, and decimals will be rounded up to the next whole integer. For storage resources such as Archival (HPSS) and CFS space, we are standardizing on units of TB.

If you enter text, e.g., "2 million," all non-numeric characters will be stripped, and any numerals (2, in this case) will be saved. Also, any number that is entered as a decimal will be rounded to a whole integer. So please carefully check the values after you save the draft.

Computational Resources¶

There are two separate compute allocation pools: one for all CPU-only nodes (Perlmutter CPU-only nodes) and another for the Perlmutter GPU-accelerated nodes. Allocations, charging, and usage tracking will be in units of Node Hours. The basis for one CPU node hour is time spent running on one Perlmutter CPU-only node for one hour. Similarly, one GPU Node Hour is charged for running on a single Perlmutter GPU-accelerated node for one hour. When requesting GPU Node hours, you will need to include a statement of your code's readiness to run on GPUs.

We ask you to assess the GPU readiness of the codes you plan to use on the Perlmutter GPU nodes. There is a wide range of discussions that are possible to describe GPU readiness for our codes and user base. So, please provide the relevant information about your current GPU status, plans, goals, and/or limitations to help us understand the current state of your codes and what will best serve your success in the future.

Archival Storage¶

All NERSC projects have accounts on the HPSS mass storage system, Archive. See HPSS Charging for details. Please enter how much HPSS Archival storage space you anticipate you will need. Include enough storage space in your request to cover your currently stored files and your anticipated additional storage for the new year. Please enter the number in whole Terabytes. This will be your new total quota for the year.

Shared Project Storage in the NERSC Community File System¶

Each project receives storage space in the NERSC Community File System (CFS). These are sometimes called "project directories." Project directories are renewed by entering the CFS Storage Requested amount in TBs. Each project receives 20 TB by default. Please enter how much CFS storage space you anticipate you will need. Include enough storage space in your request to cover your currently stored files and your anticipated additional storage for the new year. Please enter the number in whole Terabytes. This will be your new total quota for the year. Requests for a higher quota will be reviewed by DOE program managers.

Brief Justification for Requested Resources¶

Tell us how you determined/estimated the number of compute hours and data storage space you requested above as a justification for the Reviewers to determine the appropriateness of your request. Please include justification for large increases in storage space requests.

Events or Deadlines¶

Please describe any anticipated periods of unusually high or low utilization throughout the year. If your forecasted computer usage will be uneven throughout the year, please provide a percentage breakdown by quarter so we can consider this in our allocation management planning.

Real-Time Computing Needs¶

Does your project require real-time computing resources? For example, does your project require immediate access to computing resources because it is connected to a live experiment? Please select either "Yes" or "No". If you answer "Yes" you will be presented with a text box to explain your answer.

Experimental or Observational project?¶

Will the primary role of this project be to support the operation of and/or data analysis from an experimental or observational facility or mission?

Check the box if this applies to your project.

Special Requirements¶

If this project has multi-year needs in support of a mission or DOE project or has other special needs (e.g., libraries or software, data pipeline requirements, etc.), please describe those here.

Codes Tab¶

The code descriptions you provide are used by DOE and NERSC to evaluate the type and extent of machine resources that users require.

A code description should be provided for each of your project’s five most frequently used or important codes and applications.

The following information is requested for each code:

• Code Name: This is the name by which your code is known, e.g., NIMROD, AMBER.
• URL: A URL that points to a description of the code, and how it is accessed.
• Code Description: Provide a brief description of the code. What does the code do? What are the science questions it addresses?
• Code is GPU Enabled?: Check this box if your code is able to be run using GPUs.

Supporting Information Tab¶

Other HPC Support¶

List any additional HPC resources that may be awarded or otherwise committed to this project (from outside NERSC). This is resources beyond what is available locally, e.g., a DOE INCITE award, an XSEDE award, etc., but not a local institutional cluster.

Additional Information¶

If your project has special requirements that you would like NERSC to consider, describe them here. Enter any additional information you would like the review committee to consider in support of this request.

Feedback¶

Use this space to provide feedback on ERCAP, the NERSC application/allocation process.

Usage Agreement Tab¶

If this project is given a NERSC award, I agree to monitor the usage associated with it to ensure that, to the best of my ability, usage is for the project described here. Furthermore, if this is a continuing project, I confirm that I have audited the usage associated with this project, to the best of my ability, to determine all usage was for the project specified.

Enter your initials in the designated box as an electronic signature that you agree to these terms. You must enter your agreement, or you will not be able to submit your ERCAP request.

Submitting your request¶

When you are satisfied with your answers to all the questions on the request form, click the "Submit for Review" button. You will be asked to confirm that you are ready to submit your request. Clicking on the "OK" button will submit your request and send it to the appropriate DOE program manager for evaluation.

Printing and Saving to Disk¶

The "Create PDF" button is in the top right corner of the request window. When you click this button, the ERCAP system will generate a PDF and attach it to your request. You should see the file name below the gray bar where the "Create PDF" button is located.

You can then download the PDF, save it to your local computer, and print it.

Advice for Answering Long Text Questions¶

It is not recommended that you directly type in long answers. Rather, compose your answers elsewhere, and paste them into the ERCAP text boxes.

Most of the text boxes are limited to a maximum of 4,000 characters. Many of these large text fields are also attached to what is called an overflow table. This effectively allows for an 8,000-character entry. We used to have a character counter that would display the number of characters you had entered, but if you went over the 4,000 character limit of the initial field, it would display a negative number for the count of the characters going into the overflow field. These negative numbers were causing a lot of confusion, so we disabled the counter. Please review a PDF of your request before you submit it to ensure that the full text of your response was saved. For longer, more detailed answers, you can always attach additional documents to the ERCAP request.

ERCAP error messages¶

Most of the fields have self-checking actions associated with them, and you will be notified immediately if you have entered something incorrectly.

Before you can submit your request, you must answer all mandatory questions. These are indicated with a red asterisk next to the question label. Also, any tab that has an unanswered mandatory question in it will have a small asterisk next to the tab label. If you have any unanswered mandatory questions when you try to submit your request, you will get an error message at the top of the form telling you which question(s) need to be answered.

Deleting a request¶

If you need to delete a request, email the allocations support team at allocations@nersc.gov.