05.08.2023
Start of AURELEO projects
Austrian research projects awarded access to the Italian supercomputer LEONARDO through the first national call have started.
Due to Austria’s participation in the consortium of the new LEONARDO supercomputer (Bologna, Italy), a share of LEONARDO’s enormous computing resources is reserved for Austrian users. The Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC) team is managing national access to the Italian system.
During the first Austrian call for applications, 11 projects were awarded access to LEONARDO as per national criteria. They started computing at the beginning of August 2023. The researchers applied from the following institutions: University of Vienna, TU Wien, University of Innsbruck, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Institute of Science and Technology Austria, and GeoSphere Austria.
The awarded projects are associated with the following research fields:
- AI for large language models
- AI for drug discovery
- AI for soft matter
- AI for weather prediction
- Molecular dynamics
- Quantum chemistry
- Classical computational physics
Austrian users have access to 500.000 GPU hours a year on LEONARDO’s booster module. In terms of computational power, this share is equivalent to the GPU partition of the current VSC-5 installation. LEONARDO's GPU resources are a major leap forward to accommodate the growing demand for high-performance computing in Austria to support data-intensive tasks such as advanced modeling and machine learning across various research domains.
What’s next?
The next cut-off date of the national AURELEO call is tentatively set to spring 2024. Meanwhile, users needing more GPU resources can apply for a benchmark or development access on LEONARDO to get familiar with the system or apply for other modes of access on LEONARDO or other 
EuroHPC machines.
Contact the VSC team for more information and help with applications for compute time: leonardo@vsc.ac.at.
Further information:
About the AURELEO calls