To apply for an allocation, you must be a researcher or educator at a U.S. institution. A principal investigator (PI) may not be a high school, undergraduate, or graduate student; a qualified advisor must serve in this capacity. A postdoc is eligible to serve as PI. If your institution is not a university or a 2- or 4-year college, special rules may apply. Generally, the guidelines outlined in the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) current Grant Proposal Guide apply. Prospective PIs are advised to review this guide for NSF's eligibility rules regarding allocations requests.
The PACI Online Proposal System (POPS) is used for submission of all allocations requests (including TeraGrid). If you have never submitted an online proposal for PACI resources before, please follow the steps in the POPS User's Guide as you go through the process. If you are familiar with the process, you may go directly to POPS.
Hardcopy submission of proposals is no longer accepted. POPS accepts PDF, HTML, Microsoft Word, and PostScript file formats, though the PDF file format is preferred. Please review the POPS User's Guide.
A successful large award requires a detailed justification of resource usage. New users may find the Development Allocations Committee (DAC) accounts helpful in benchmarking their codes for a larger request.
The table below lists the three types of awards: DAC, Medium Resource Allocations Committee, and Large Resource Allocations Committee. For more information about available machines (including TeraGrid capabilities) and allocable Service Units (SUs), please visit the PACI Computational Resources and Documentation. For more information about non-SU resources, such as database and data-collection hosting, please see Data Resources.
| Available Machines | Service Units (SUs) Requested | Frequency | Proposal Deadlines & Start Dates | Descriptions & Restrictions |
| Development Allocations Committee (DAC) | ||||
| All | 0 - 10000 (0 - 30000 for TeraGrid) |
Reviewed and awarded continuously | DACs do not have fixed submission deadlines or start dates. | Small awards targeted at new users and those investigating new architectures; it is expected that DAC awards lead to Medium or Large Resource Allocations Committee requests. |
| Medium Resource Allocations Committee (former AAB and PRAC combined) | ||||
| All | 10001 - 200000 (30001 - 200000 for TeraGrid) |
Reviewed and awarded quarterly | Proposals are generally due in January, April, July, and October, with start dates in April, July, October, and January respectively. See Allocations Meetings and Deadlines for current information. | Medium-sized awards appropriate for most users with mature
computational projects.
(See samples of well-written AAB and PRAC proposals.) |
| Large Resource Allocations Committee (formerly NRAC) | ||||
| All | 200001 - above | Reviewed and awarded twice per year | Proposals are generally due in January and July, with start dates in April and October respectively. See Allocations Meetings and Deadlines for current information. | Large awards for users with very extensive computational
requirements..
(See samples of well-written NRAC proposals.) |
Although all of the information required for submitting a proposal is included on this page, each PACI partner maintains similar information locally. (See the Alliance, NPACI, or PSC pages.)
TeraGrid PIs can request either Roaming (R) or Site-Specific (S) allocations. If you choose roaming (R allocations), your applications will use whichever resources become available at the time you run them.
Note: Individual sites may handle roaming allocations via special queues with lower priority.
If you choose site specific (S allocations), you can select specific resources on which you want time. In such cases, you may either implicitly receive or explicitly request roaming time on all other TeraGrid resources.
The PACI and DTF Resource Allocations Policies document (download v1.0.a in HTML or PDF [240KB]) provides policy and instruction on the preparation of proposals for allocations of resources from the NSF’s PACI program. In addition, this document addresses allocations of resources of the TeraGrid (or Distributed Terascale Facility), which are also allocated through the PACI allocations process.
The TeraGrid's specialized resources, which include a high-speed network, massive amounts of storage, remote visualization systems, online data collections, and database hosting capabilities, are currently distributed among five partner sites. The TeraGrid will be allocated as a collective resource – an allocation on the TeraGrid provides access to all of its resources. TeraGrid proposals should specify any requests for special capabilities of particular resources (e.g. the visualization cluster at ANL).
Included in the PACI and DTF Resource Allocations Policies document are:
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Questions regarding the PACI and DTF Resource Allocations Policies document should be directed to John Towns.
Papers, publications, and Web pages of any material (whether copyrighted or not) based on or developed under TeraGrid-supported projects must be submitted to the TeraGrid Allocations Department for their records. Send papers, publications, and/or a list of Web page URLs to allocations@teragrid.org in PDF (.pdf) or Word (.doc) format.
