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We provide researchers with capacity and expertise for high performance computing, data processing and cloud computing. Find out how you can request access and support from SURF.
More than 1,000,000 SBU on supercomputer Snellius (CPU and/or GPU) whether or not combined with terabytes of project space and/or Data Archive (offline tape storage);
More than 500,000 CPU core hours and/or 14,000 GPU hours and/or 100,000 TB-hours of storage on the pre-exascale supercomputer LUMI, whether or not combined with terabytes of online storage and/or offline storage;
More than 1,000,000 CPU core hours or 10,000 GPU hours of Data Processing (Grid and/or Spider) and/or more than 200 TB of online data storage and/or more than 300 TB of Grid storage - tape (offline tape storage);
More than 50,000 CPU core hours or 5,000 GPU hours on HPC Cloud (via SURF Research Cloud) whether or not combined with terabytes of online storage and/or Data Archive (offline tape storage);
More than 100,000 CPU core hours on Cloud Research Consultancy whether or not combined with terabytes of online storage.
Researchers may submit an application if they have a tenured position (and therefore a paid position for an indefinite period) or a tenure track agreement at one of the following research organisations:
Universities and Universities of applied sciences, as referred to in section 1.8 of the Higher Education and Scientific Research Act (WHW) and the universities listed in the Policy Rule Universities located in the Kingdom of the Netherlands;
University medical centres, by which is meant academic hospitals as referred to in section 1.13 paragraph 1 of the Higher Education and Scientific Research Act (WHW);
KNAW and NWO institutes;
Netherlands Cancer Institute;
the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen;
NCB Naturalis;
Advanced Research Centre for NanoLithography (ARCNL).
Princess Máxima Center.
National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM);
Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI);
Wageningen University (WUR)/Dienst Landbouwkundig Onderzoek (DLO);
Netherlands Aerospace Centre (NLR);
Deltares;
Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (Marin);
If the main applicant does not have a permanent employment contract, his/her appointment must be at least as long as the duration of the project for which an application is submitted.
Those with zero-hours contracts are excluded from submitting proposals.
It could be the case that the applicant’s tenure track agreement ends before the intended completion date of the project for which funding is applied for, or that before that date, the applicant’s tenured contract ends or ends due to the applicant reaching retirement age. In that case, the applicant needs to include a statement from their employer in which the research organisation concerned guarantees that the project and all project members for whom funding has been requested will receive adequate supervision for the full duration of the project.
Applicants with part-time employment contract must guarantee adequate supervision of the project and of all persons working on the project for whom computing time is requested.
Additional requirements apply to researchers from the following institutions:
Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO);
IHE Delft Institute for Water Education;
Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI);
The following institutions participating in SURF cooperative: National Archives (NA), Royal Library (KB), University for Humanistics (UvH), Police Academy and Integral Cancer Centre of the Netherlands (IKNL).
The organisation should be:
Based in the Netherlands;
A foundation, association or public-law legal entity;
Principally engaged itself in conducting fundamental research, industrial research or experimental development in an independent manner;
Be able to declare that the organisation keeps separate accounting regarding economic/non-economic activities and that companies with decisive influence over the organisation are not given preferential access to the organisation's research results.
Please note: Prior to submitting an application, NWO checks on the basis of the above conditions whether an organisation complies with Article 1.1(4) of the NWO Grant Rules and may therefore participate as an applicant. NWO carries out this check partly to make sure that there is no question of granting prohibited State Aid. This check should also be carried out if an organisation already has been assessed within another NWO programme and was permitted as an applicant.
For the purpose of this check, the organisation of the intended applicant shall provide the following documents by email to rekentijd@nwo.nl at least 10 working days prior to submission:
A recent extract from the Chamber of Commerce;
The deed of incorporation and/or current statutes;
The latest available financial statement provided with an audit report;
The completed Declaration research organisation, available on the Call for proposals webpage.
For both Small Compute Applications (NWO) and Large Compute Applications (NWO), the total capacity available is as follows:
Supercomputer Snellius: 1,902 million SBU (1,283 million SBU CPU thin nodes, 426 million SBU GPU nodes, 184 million SBU CPU fat nodes, 9 million SBU CPU high-memory nodes), with 9,896 TB of Snellius project space.
Pre-exascale supercomputer LUMI: 21.32 million CPU core-hours, 0.96 million GPU hours, 10.1 million TB-hours of storage.
HPC Cloud (via SURF Research Cloud): 26.28 million CPU core-hours and 1.33 million GPU hours, with 846 TB of online storage.
15,000 TB Data Archive (offline tape storage).
Data Processing (Grid and/or Spider): 150 million CPU core-hours and 0.3 million GPU hours, with 28,000 TB of online storage and 14,000 TB of Grid storage - tape (offline tape storage).
Cloud Research Consultancy: 1.3 million CPU core-hours, with 265 TB online storage.
200 TB storage Research Drive.
Access to LUMI is best suited for projects that require computations at an extreme scale, specifically GPU accelerated workloads on tens to hundreds of GPUs. You can apply for LUMI access if your project requires computations at such scale, or if it targets other LUMI-specific hardware.
A LUMI-regular application should be preceded by a LUMI pilot or another LUMI project to make sure that your code runs successfully on AMD hardware and scales well to large numbers of GPUs.
Several universities also offer high performance computing facilities with powerful servers on which researchers, PhDs and students connected to their university can interactively work on data and run computations. These are particularly of interest if you need relatively small amounts of capacity, or if you need HPC capacity for educational purposes.  See the high performance compute facilities at universities page for a complete overview.
Also some institutions purchase capacity directly from SURF, which their researchers and students can use. See the direct access to compute services page for an overview.
For Large Compute applications (NWO) there are no limitations.
It is not possible to raise the requested capacity for an awarded Large Compute application(NWO). A new application will need to be done.
Applicants with a permanent contract can sign their application themselves. Applicants with a temporary employment contract must have the application digitally signed by a responsible scientific supervisor with a permanent appointment. With this, the supervisor declares to guarantee the justification of allocated computing time, storage and support. This scientific supervisor may act as guarantor for several applicants.
Large Compute applications are typically reviewed and approved within 2-3 months. However, applicants get preliminary access to the systems several weeks after applying.
Yes, on the NWO website. NWO publishes all granted Large compute applications (NWO) via news items. At the bottom of these announcements there is an appendix with all Small compute applications (NWO) via SURF.
We advise you to always consult a SURF advisor to discuss and submit a large application. Please create a ticket on our Servicedesk portal and we will get in touch.
Yes, a one-time extension of max 12 months is possible.
For LUMI a one-time extension of 3 months is possible.
Please create a ticket on our Servicedesk portal and we will get in touch.