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October 20, 2011

Free Cycles for Big Science

Tiffany Trader

As part of its BigScience Challenge 2011, Cycle Computing is providing $10,000 in free CycleCloud time "to help researchers answer questions that will help humanity." The grand prize winner will receive the equivalent of eight hours on a 30,000-core cluster plus four hours of CycleCloud engineering support.

In his blog, Cycle Computing's CEO Jason Stowe, explains the impetus for the Challenge:

The problem is, today, researchers are in the long-term habit of sizing their questions to the compute cluster they have, rather than the other way around. This isn't the way we should work. We should provision compute at the scale the questions need. We're talking about taking questions that require a million hours of computation, and answering them in a day. Securely. At reasonable cost.

Stowe calls this "utility supercomputing," the ability to provision a TOP500 supercomputing resource for researchers to use for a few hours at a time. When they're done, the resources can be turned off, or reprovisioned for another purpose.

This model lets scientists do what they do best, focus on the research with the assurance that the resources will be there when they need them.

The challenge seeks "to help a single researcher with an un-askable question" — a cure for cancer, Alzheimer's, diabetes, climate change solutions. In addition to the grand prize, there are up to five finalist prizes of $500 of CycleCloud usage credit with four hours of CycleCloud engineering support.

The contest is open to individuals or researchers from non-profit organizations. Interested parties can find out more at CycleCloud BigScience Challenge 2011. Proposals are due November 7, 2011, and finalists will be announced at Booth #443 at Supercomputing 2011.

Full story at Compute Cycles Blog

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