Call for Proposals for High-Impact Science at Scale on Perlmutter

April 7, 2025

NERSC is inviting proposals to conduct high-impact, cutting-edge scientific research using the large-scale capabilities of the Perlmutter supercomputer. This call is seeking submissions for research that is enabled or accelerated by running jobs or workflows at high parallel concurrency on 256 or more Perlmutter GPU nodes (1,024 GPUs) and/or 512 or more Perlmutter CPU nodes (1,024 AMD CPUs with 65,000 cores).

Each project may be awarded up to 25,000 GPU Node Hours and/or 25,000 CPU Node Hours. Additional compute time may be granted based on demonstrated need and effective utilization. Please refer to the technical documentation for more information on NERSC’s charging units.

Review Criteria

Only proposals that currently do not have large allocations on Perlmutter to run at scale are eligible. Proposals from novel scientific areas that may be new to large-scale HPC will be prioritized. Eligible proposals will be evaluated based on the following criteria:

Scientific impact
Relevance to the missions of NERSC, Berkeley Lab, and the DOE Office of Science
Technical feasibility and ability of the team to carry out the proposed campaign
Clarity and reasonableness of proposed resource usage plan (number of jobs, nodes used, wallclock time)
Clarity in scope, timeline, and objectives

The awards are for a six-month period, from June to the end of November 2025. At the end of the term, awarded proposals must submit a one-page closeout and highlight summary to NERSC. Renewal for an additional six-month period in 2026 will be considered and evaluated based on accomplishments achieved in the initial phase.

How to Apply

Complete and submit the application form by April 29, 2025, for full consideration. If all resources remain after the initial awards, additional applications will be reviewed until all available resources have been allocated.

Please email Amanda Dufek (asdufek@lbl.gov) or Jack Deslippe (jrdeslippe@lbl.gov) for further information.

About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility that serves as the primary high performance computing center for scientific research sponsored by the Office of Science. Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, NERSC serves almost 10,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials science, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. Berkeley Lab is a DOE national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy. »Learn more about computing sciences at Berkeley Lab.