The aim of the VENUS-C Open Call is to expand the user community, gather additional requirements for the VENUS- platform, test and validate it by funding between 10 and 20 new pilot prototypes with applications suited to the Cloud. The Call is open to European public and private research organisations involved in Research and Technology Development (RTD) from the 27 Member States and the 13 Associated Countries (Annexes). The Open Call targets a spectrum of application areas (Annexes), spanning the Arts & Humanities, Engineering, Health & Life Sciences, Economics and Financial Services, Natural Sciences, as well as maths and science with application characteristics such as dynamic scaling requirements, peak demands and ubiquitous availability. Specifically VENUS-C aims to bring on board research groups that have operational and scientifically productive application software already running on platforms, whether commodity clusters, HPC clusters, grids or clouds.

 VENUS-C will work closely with the new pilots to determine what features and capabilities of Cloud computing environments are needed to support the type of computing exemplified by the selected pilots, and to validate the VENUS-C infrastructure in this aim. To this end, the pilots will have collective access to 6.000.000 CPU hours per year of Windows Azure and 40 TBytes of storage plus additional CPU hours and TBytes available from other VENUS-C providers. Seed funds will be provided to catalyse take-off. VENUS-C will also provide technical support to address specific the specific needs of the pilots and enable users through innovative web-based and physical training. The pilot prototypes will have access to the VENUS-C infrastructure from July 2011 until May 2012 with a one-year extension to the Azure and other platforms until May 2013. Visibility will be ensured through focused VENUS-C dissemination activities, including the support of media partnerships.

VENUS-C would like to thank the eScienceTalk project and the following media partners for their support of the Open Call: International Science Grid This Week (iSGTW, to be re-named The Digital Scientist), Supercomputing Online, Science|Business and EnterTheGrid.

 

Open Call Documents

Complete Open Call Documentation: Application Form and all the details, including the procedures, full list of target scientific areas, eligible countries, expectations and evaluation, and an FAQ.

Application Form

Annexes

FAQ


Important Dates

  • Open Call Launch: Tuesday 11 January 2011.

  • midnight CEST Monday 11 April 2011

  • Evaluation notification: Monday 2 May 2011.

Submission

You may submit the completed Application Form through the on-line form below. However, to facilitate processing, we recommend you send the word version to contact@venus-c.eu. Proposers will receive by return email a PDF version of the Application Form for verification with a number, randomly allocated, for internal purposes.
Acknowledgement of receipt does not represent endorsement or acceptance of the proposal. All Proposals will receive a confidential evaluation in May 2011.
VENUS-C is committed to selecting the best possible pilots. Please feel free to contact us via email (contact@venus-c.eu) for any assistance, marking your message “VENUS-C Open Call Enquiry” before the 11 April 2011 deadline.

Information on the proposer
Proposal title:  
Acronym for the proposal:  
Name of the group/department and institution:  
Website of the department or affiliation:  
Contact person full name  
Contact person e-mail  

Brief CV of the Proposer (<500 words): 

Information on the scope of the application
Main scientific area (see Annex 1):  
Secondary scientific area:  
Number of users involved (please indicate):  
Brief description of the application and associated use cases  

State-of-the-art in the field and expected advance

Description of the positioning of the project among other contributions in the domain (<2000 words):  

Bibliographic references or relevant projects (the most relevant 2-5 contributions): 

Expected Impact

Describe briefly the main motivations behind porting the application to the cloud (e.g. limitations of the current approach) (<500 words): 

What are the potential benefits for the Proposer and its scientific community in using VENUS-C? (e.g. reducing processing time, increased capability to run larger problems, new features, improved management of resources, improved exploitability, etc.) Is it a key activity in your research?(< 500 words): 

Has any other similar application been migrated to cloud? (if yes, please provide references <500 words): 

Information about the application feautures
What is the parallel approach (if any) of the application? (e.g. high-throughput, Map reduce-like, data parallelism, workflow, etc.)
 
What is the application bottleneck? (Tick all the relevant options)
How is it used?

Please add any other requirements associated with the application. 

Application Status

Degree of maturity of the application in its current status:  

Has the application already been adapted to a Cloud infrastructure?  

Has the application already been adapted to another Distributed Computing Infrastructure  

Effort for the adaptation required
Approximately how much effort is required by the Proposer Group to adapt the application? (in terms of person/months based on average working day, the expected effort and number of group members to be allocated to the adaptation minus public holidays and annual leave):
 

Will the Proposer Group be able to participate in demonstration and dissemination actions (in terms of person/months)?  

Number of people currently using the application:
 

Software required/dependecies

Describe the software dependencies needed to run the application, indicating origin and requirements.
Name and version License Model / URL
Need for administrative rights Platform / Compiler

Indicate if the application has dependencies on databases
Name and version Availability / URL Access needs (R/W)
Do any of the dependencies require a commercial license?    

Estimation of required Resources

Computational, storage and bandwidth resources for the whole experiment

For the pilot proposed Approx. for future production usage
Estimation of total single-core CPU hours required (as a reference, considering a basic Ms Azure host)    
Number of individual executions needed for a single experiment    
Main memory (RAM) required for each individual job (GB)    
Permanent disk storage required in total (GB)    
Temporal disk storage required (GB)    
Number of individual files    
Input data size for each individual job (MB)    
Output data size for each individual job (MB)    
Do the jobs in the cloud require external connectivity (Indicate Bandwidth in MBit/s and the volume of transfer in GB if so)    

Will usage consist in a single execution or a periodic repetition of executions?  

Ethical evaluation
Does the application proposed use information that requires informed consent?  
Does it imply biological or genetic samples?   
Does it involve personal data?