Report Guidelines for Blue Waters Professor Project Allocations

Each year a report should be submitted to the Blue Waters Project Office.   To renew a Blue Waters Professor allocation, please submit the following information. The intent is to make this report publicly available on the project's portal as a Blue Waters Technical Report.  Please indicate if the report includes confidential or restricted information, in which case it will be only shared with the Blue Waters team and the National Science Foundation.

 

Submit your report

The reports should include the following sections:

  • Project Information

    • Project title
    • Name and institution of principal investigator
    • Names and affiliations of co-PIs and collaborators
    • Corresponding author name and contact information (email)

  • Executive summary (150 words)

  • Description of research activities and results

    • Key Challenges: description of the science/engineering problem being addressed
    • Why it Matters: description of the potential impact of solving this research problem, and, if appropriate, the educational outcomes. For exploratory allocations, indicate whether the results will be used to substantiate a future proposal.
    • Why Blue Waters: explanation of why you need the unique scale and attributes of Blue Waters to address these challenges; if relevant, provide an assessment of code(s) performance on Blue Waters.
    • Accomplishments: explanation of results you obtained

  • List of publications associated with this work

List any publications and products (including papers in-preparation and submitted, posters, and curricular materials that can be made available to the community). Indicate the current state (work in progress/submitted/published). If available, please include the DOI for published works.

Highlight any keynote or other presentations that featured your work on Blue Waters.

  • Plan for next year

Describe the Blue Waters resources required for next year. This description should include the number of system nodes needed for your runs, the anticipated actual memory usage, the expected numbers of each major class of arithmetic and logical operation, the expected numbers of local and remote memory accesses, the total number of node-hours required, the anticipated input and output requirements, the amount of data that you anticipate transferring to or from the Blue Waters enclave, the amount and type of storage required and any other system resource needs that you anticipate

For assistance in computing node hours for Blue Waters see: https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/node_core_comparison

For a description of the default storage quotas see: https://bluewaters.ncsa.illinois.edu/storage. If your project will require storage limits that exceed the standard quotas, provide a justification in support of your request.

Provide an estimated Blue Waters usage schedule. The estimate should be per quarter and may be represented as a percent of the requested allocation (e.g. Q1: 10%, Q2: 20%, Q3: 50%, Q4: 20%).

 

The report should be submitted as a PDF file. There are no specific formatting instructions. It is recommended to include visualizations, charts and other images in the document to help illustrate the results. 

If you have questions, please contact Jay Roloff at cesc@ncsa.illinois.edu or the Blue Waters support staff at help+bw@ncsa.illinois.edu.