Special Projects

Users within one of ECMWF's Member States may apply for resources as a 'Special Project'. This possibility is particularly, but not exclusively, suitable for projects which are undertaken in co-operation between several institutions, nationally or internationally. The decision to treat a project request as a Special Project application is made ultimately by the Director of the national meteorological service of the project's Principal Investigator. Internal procedures will, however, depend on the national meteorological service.

European organisations with which ECMWF has concluded Co-operation Agreements may apply for resources for a Special Project, such a request to be considered by the Director-General of ECMWF.

Special Projects are defined as 'experiments or investigations of a scientific or technical nature, undertaken by one or more Member States, likely to be of interest to the general scientific community'.

To get an idea of the kind of research which has been approved as Special Projects, please refer to the Table of current Special Projects.

Computing resources available to Special Projects

The allocation of computing resources is decided by the ECMWF Council. The Council guidelines on distribution of computer resources currently state that a maximum of 10% of the computing resources available to Member States may be allocated to Special Projects. 20% of that 10% is set aside as a reserve for allocation by ECMWF directly (following consultation with the Chairmen of the Technical Advisory Committee and the Scientific Advisory Committee) either to late applicants or to projects which have exhausted their allocation before the end of the year.

The total resources available for allocation to Special Projects in 2012 are estimated to

HPCF:	130	million units
Data Storage:	540	terabytes

of which the following reserve is set aside for later allocation

HPCF:	26	million units
Data Storage:	108	terabytes

Estimating your resource requirements

Your Computing Representative may be able to advise you on the amount of resources you should apply for or (s)he may suggest that you contact your Member State's User Support Contact Point at ECMWF for advice.

Special Projects - how to apply

A form 'Request for a Special Project' should be completed and sent to ECMWF via the appropriate national meteorological service Director. If possible, you should submit the form to reach ECMWF by 30 April of the year preceding the year in which you wish to begin work on the project. Your request will be reviewed, along with all the other Special Project requests, by the Scientific Advisory Committee and Technical Advisory Committee and finally approved (or not) by the ECMWF Council at its December session in the same year (see the "Guidelines for handling applications for computing resources for Special Projects").

If you miss the 30 April deadline, you should apply as soon as you can: you may be eligible to receive resources from the 20% of Special Project resources which are set aside as a reserve specifically for ad hoc allocation. To submit a late request via your national meteorological service please use the form provided.

Please note that once your project has been approved and resources have been granted for up to 3 years, you will still need to apply for continuation via your national meteorological service each year for the entire duration of your project.

Procedure for the handling of applications

Due to the large oversubscription of computing resources available to Special Projects, the Scientific Advisory Committee and Technical Advisory Committee have requested ECMWF to review the procedure for the handling of applications from Member States for computer time for Special Projects. As result, for the first time for projects started in 2009, requests are handled as follows

• Each project will have a well defined duration, up to a maximum of three years, agreed at the beginning of the project.
• The amount of resources requested by each project for each year cannot exceed more than 8% of the total amount of resources available for that year. For 2012 these limits are
  

  HPCF:	10.4	million units
  Data Storage:	43200	gigabytes

• To avoid accepted Special Project requests needing reduction by more than 20%, some Special Projects requesting large amounts of computing resources may not be accepted.

Applying for additional resources for an existing project

Should you exhaust your resource allocation before the year's end, you can, at any time, apply for an allocation from any resources remaining in the reserve. Please note that a relatively large request for additional resources might trigger a more thorough evaluation of your project. To apply for additional resources, please use the form provided.

Progress and final reports

ECMWF expects to receive annual progress reports by 30 June each year and a final report by 30 April in the year following the end of a Special Project. Both final reports and annual progress reports will be published on the ECMWF website and taken into consideration by the Scientific Advisory Committee for the evaluation of any new Special Project application from a Principal Investigator or from members of the same project/working group.

For your reports please use the progress report template and final report template.