Transnational Access

The project is based on a program of visit, in the form of traditional transnational access, with researchers visiting HPC centres and/or scientific hosts who will mentor them scientifically and technically for the best exploitation of the HPC resources in their research. The visitors will be funded for travel, accommodation and subsistence, and provided with an amount of computing time suitable for the approved project.

The calls for applications are issued 4 times per year and published online on the HPC-Europa3 website.

A web-based interface has been set-up to submit applications. Detailed guidelines and an on-line FAQ are also provided to assist the applicants with the process. Each application will be then reviewed independently according to its technical and scientific merits, before being considered by the Scientific Users’ Selection Panel.

Transnational Access HPC Sites

If you wish to apply for a visit grant and if you intend to spend a research period in one of the 9 centres around Europe, please read the guidelines and then fill in the on-line form.

This is the only way to apply for the project but if you have any question concerning the project or the application procedure feel free to contact us.

The Supercomputing centres participating in the Transnational Access activity are: CINECA (Bologna - IT), EPCC (Edinburgh - UK), BSC (Barcelona - SP), HLRS (Stuttgart - DE), SurfSARA (Amsterdam - NL), CSC (Helsinki - FIN), GRNET (Athens, GR), KTH (Stockolm, SE), ICHEC (Dublin, IE).

Transnational Access Regional programme

One of the new objectives of HPC-Europa3 project is the extension of the geographic coverage of the Transitional Access programme. In this context, HPC-Europa3 visitors from the Baltic and the South East European (including Western Balkans and Eastern Partnership) countries are also highly encouraged to apply.

Moreover, a new opportunity for less experienced in HPC researchers from these countries has been implemented through the so called Regional Access sub-programme.

There are three main differences between the Transitional Access programme and the Regional Access sub-programme:

  1. Only users from the Baltic and the South East European countries are allowed to apply to the Regional Access sub-programme.
  2. The HPC centres that will be hosting the Regional Access sub-programme visitors are KTH-PDC (Sweden) for the visitors from the Baltic countries and GRNET (Greece) for the visitors from the South East European countries.
  3. Only applicants from the Baltic and the South East European countries that have "no" or "little" experience in HPC will be allowed to apply for the Regional Access sub-programme.

Other than these three points, there aren't any differences between the Transitional Access programme and the Regional Access sub-programme.

So, summarizing, if you are an applicant from one of the Baltic or Western Balkan countries and have "no" or "a little" experience in using HPC systems, you should apply to Swedish and Greek centres respectively. A warning will appear you if the correspondence between your country and the selected host centre location is not fulfilling this requirement.

For questions related Regional Access Programme for the Baltic countries feel free to contact Dr. Lilit Axner at lilit (at) kth.se

For questions related Regional Access Programme for the South East European an countries feel free to contact Dr. Evangelia Athanasaki at eathan (at) grnet.gr

Transnational Access general rules

If your application has been accepted by the Scientific Users' Selection Panel, HPC-Europa3 staff from the selected HPC centre will contact you in a short time in order to arrange your visit. In the pages of each center, you can find information about the organization of your stay.

Within one month after the end of your stay, you have to submit:

  • an abstract of your project (250-400 words), to be delivered to the EC and to be made public on the project website, including two sections: objectives and main achievements including difficulties encountered,
  • the HPC-Europa3 questionnaire aimed for our internal quality control,
  • an EC questionnaire available on the EC website regarding your stay during your HPC-Europa3 visit.

After the end of your visit and possibly within 4 months after it, we kindly ask you also to submit:

  • a short paper (max 1 page), in order to report the work performed during your stay. It will be published in the HPC-Europa3 project directory, and
  • one or more relevant images of your work.

When you publish anything related to the work you carried out during your visit, we kindly ask you to acknowledge the HPC-Europa3 project fuding and also to upload the reference to the published paper using the text below:

"The work has been performed under the Project HPC-EUROPA3 (INFRAIA-2016-1-730897), with the support of the EC Research Innovation Action under the H2020 Programme; in particular, the author gratefully acknowledges the support of [name and department of your host] and the computer resources and technical support provided by [name of HPC centre]."

Templates and/or forms for each of the above are available in the online system under the "Applications" menu. If you select under "approved appls" the one for which you have completed the visit, you will find the list of the contractual obligations with the related information (if you have problems with your login or password please feel free to contact us).