NCAR Wyoming Supercomputing Center

Information about Wyoming-NCAR Alliance Allocations

There are two types of allocations: start-up or educational allocations, and large computing allocations.  Requests for the use of the Wyoming portion of NWSC computational resources should address challenging science problems in the atmospheric and related sciences requiring capability computing, contribute to cross-disciplinary research in the geosciences and Earth System sciences, and help attain the goals of fostering substantive scientific and computational collaborations between UW and NCAR, EPSCoR jurisdictions, or front-range researchers.

The next Large Allocation requests for resources are due June 03, 2024. Awards will be made by July 12, 2024, with projects able to start in August 2024.

Note all large allocation requests will be for use of the new Cheyenne supercomputer. See https://www2.cisl.ucar.edu/resources/computational-systems/cheyenne for more details. 

Large Computing Allocations.

All large computing allocations will be reviewed by the Wyoming Resource Allocations Panel (WRAP). Large computing proposal requests for the use of WNA must:

1. Have scientific merit;

If a proposal has been peer-reviewed and has received an NSF or other Federal agency grant, then it will be deemed to have scientific merit. Proposals funded by a Wyoming State agency are subject to review processes conducted by UW and the State agency and, if approved for funding by the State agency, will be deemed to have scientific merit.

Requests without merit-reviewed support will have their scientific merit reviewed by the allocation committee, in addition to the computational merit. If the WRAP co-chairs feel the WRAP does not have sufficient expertise in the field in question, the WRAP co-chairs shall solicit external reviews of the science to determine scientific merit.

2. Focus on research or support HPC curricula related to Earth System Science areas that  are of substantial interest to the  Wyoming-NCAR Alliance.

List of eligible areas

List of UW researchers using scientific computing in eligible areas

3. Include UW researchers as PI or co-PI of the qualifying grant or, in the event of unfunded projects, as principal collaborator in the scientific activity. 

Start-up and Educational Allocations.

UW graduate students and post-docs, and UW faculty working towards creating data, testing algorithms, etc., for a future grant proposal, or small allocations in support of a funded scientific project are eligible to apply for a start-up allocation. Startup and educational requests will be reviewed by the WRAP co-chairs upon submission. No panel review is needed for a start-up request, and such a request can usually be accommodated within a few business days. 

The use of high-performance computing in undergraduate and graduate courses at UW is encouraged, and accounts can be provided to individual students and the UW professor for assignments involving numerical simulations, modeling, and use of recently developed computational architecture. Faculty needing to use of the Wyoming resource for an undergraduate or graduate course they are teaching should send e-mail to wrap@uwyo.edu describing the anticipated software needs, storage and computing usage prior to the start of the semester the course is taught.

Allocation Policy for UW Adjunct Faculty

University of Wyoming (UW) adjunct faculty applying for core hour allocation on NWSC must provide current proof of valid adjunct status as part of their allocation request. They must also meet at least one of the following criteria:

1. Adjunct faculty must be a collaborator or CO-Pi on a grant where a University of Wyoming (UW) faculty member is the Principal Investigator (PI). The faculty PI and adjunct faculty collaborator/co-PI must be listed on the Greensheet associated with the grant proposal.

2. UW graduate students co-advised by the adjunct faculty must be conducting research in the areas supported on NWSC and the graduate student must be a user of NWSC.

3. In collaboration with a UW faculty member, demonstrate the need for use of NWSC to generate future research funding opportunities.

The Wyoming-NCAR Alliance (WNA) Resource Advisory Panel (WRAP) members will decided on allocation priority of adjunct faculty over UW faculty and students.

 For adjunct faculty who receive NWSC core hour allocations, they must acknowledge UW and NWSC (NCAR) for their research support in any publications generated from the research using NWSC.