Wim Nieuwpoort Award

The purpose of the Wim Nieuwpoort Award is to advance scientific computational research through the most efficient deployment of modern massively parallel supercomputers, for which the challenge is the use of supercomputing facilities to their maximum capability for a single application code that could lead to groundbreaking results in application areas which are of interest for science and society. The Wim Nieuwpoort Award is a joint initiative of NCF and SARA.

This annual Award is awarded to the research team, located at a Dutch university or scientific institute, which proves to be able to run a serious scientific application efficiently on a significant part of a large HPC-system.

Who can apply

In order to be eligible for the Wim Nieuwpoort Award, the following boundary conditions must be satisfied:

• The main applicant of the research team must be employed by a Dutch university or scientific research institute;
• The actual parallel computations must be performed on one of the Dutch national high-performance computing systems. Currently, these are Huygens or Lisa. (This clause will be extended in later years to address all PRACE-accessible systems.)
• The application code has not won the Wim Nieuwpoort Award in the previous three years.

What can be applied for

The winner of the Wim Nieuwpoort Award will receive 5000 euro and will be invited to show his or her work in the Dutch Research Consortium booth at SCxy in November 2012 in the USA. Common travel, lodging and costs related to the presentation for a maximum of two persons from the research team will be paid by NCF and SARA.

When can be applied

• Closing date for submitting applications was 20 October 2011

Extra Information

For detailed information see the Information document regarding the Wim Nieuwpoort Award 2011 on this page.

Criteria

The following criteria will be used by the review panel to rank the application achievements:

• Quality of the scientific research;
• Parallel scalability achievements of the implementation;
• Usability of the implementation in other scientific areas.

Procedure

In order to select the winner of the Wim Nieuwpoort Award, the following procedure for 2011 has been defined:

• The call for proposals for 2011 will be released around 1 April 2011;
• NCF and SARA need to receive proposals before 1 October 2011. A template application document will be provided for proposals. This template must be used;
• Applications must be submitted through NWO's Iris system, as 'a new application for computing time';
• Proposals will be screened on eligibility;
• Achievements will be reviewed by an independent review panel;
• The review panel will make a ranked list of proposals before 1 November 2011;
• The actual application and performance numbers that have been specified in the proposal on top of the list will be verified by SARA and NCF, and may have to be demonstrated;
• The winner will be announced at the SARA Superdag, early December 2011.

Committees

A panel of peers will review the proposals. The review panel will be composed of members of NCF's scientific committee (WGS) and will be assigned after receipt of the proposals, to enable a most transparent review and decision process. Both SARA and the NCF office will be advisors to the review panel. The review panel may decide to consult external experts.

Budget

The available budget for this call is 5000 euro and coverage of the costs of attending the Supercomputing and Communications conference in the US for two persons of the research team, to show their application.

Financiers

National Computing Facilites Foundation (NCF) and SARA