Computing Time: Core-hours and EFLOP

Applicants may request computing time for several systems at the same time within a single proposal. Supercomputers operated at JSC consist of modules which differ considerably in their architectures. So far, computing time has been requested exclusively in units of core-hours, except for the D-Wave Advantage™ System JUPSI for which resource requests have to be specified in hours. However, the effective computing power of the modules per core-hour differs substantially due to their individual architectures. Thus, computing time requirements for more than one module cannot be specified coherently by adding up core-hours over the requested modules. To take this into account, resource requirements for each resource type stated in core-hours will be converted to floating point operations in units of 10¹⁸ (EFLOP) based on the theoretical peak performance of the requested module. EFLOP reflects the amount of floating-point operations per year available to approved projects. The project’s total requirement is given by adding up the requested computing time in EFLOP for all modules. In the electronic questionnaire, computing time requirements have to be specified per resource type either, as previously, in million core-hours (Mcore-h) or in EFLOP. Both units will be converted into each other on the fly and displayed in due consideration of the requested resource types. Nonetheless, resources will be granted, allocated and accounted in core-hours only for each resource type, except for the D-Wave Advantage™ System JUPSI for which this will be done in hours.