CSCS Small

cscs.ch · Compute · 1 record · JSON

CSCS Small Compute

fails: identityinstitutionno cardDwrite-gated

www.cscs.ch/user-lab/allocation-schemes/small-projects · national HPC allocation · compute/cscs-small · JSON · compare

Free tier	"Small projects may request up to 8'000 node hours on Alps. Such projects may not exceed the granted allocation and are limited to a one-year duration." A Preparatory Project is the entry step and "is allocated a total of 250 node hours over 3 months on the HPC vCluster on Alps". Small proposals are assessed by technical evaluation only, with acceptance "within two months from submission", and no fixed deadline. unit hours; metered on wall-clock; continuous-small-allocation
Price	none stated
Per-object cap	not applicable
Retention	not applicable
Egress	not stated
Identity	institution not published
Limits	write-gated "Small projects are intended for applicants from the Swiss user community" and every proposer "must hold at least a postdoctoral position at an academic institution", so the 8,000 Alps node-hours need a Swiss academic appointment before any technical review begins. source "Small projects are intended for applicants from the Swiss user community" and every proposer "must hold at least a postdoctoral position at an academic institution", so the 8,000 Alps node-hours need a Swiss academic appointment before any technical review begins.
Binding	write-gated "Small projects are intended for applicants from the Swiss user community" and every proposer "must hold at least a postdoctoral position at an academic institution", so the 8,000 Alps node-hours need a Swiss academic appointment before any technical review begins.
Interface	unknown inferred from the tooling the provider documents; not probed
Tooling	not stated
Composes with	The quarterly reset is what makes this record useful beyond a simple rejection: a 8,000 node-hour annual allocation arrives in three-month windows and expires unused, so a workload that needs a continuous month of GPU time does not fit the shape even inside the institution.
Reliability	no reliability event recorded
Notes	Recorded as a refutation with a number rather than as capacity. The smallest CSCS door, the Preparatory Project at 250 node hours, is also the one most often described as open, and the same postdoctoral-position requirement applies to it. A node on Alps is a GH200 Grace Hopper node, so a node hour is one GH200 hour rather than one core hour, which matters when comparing the 8,000 figure with the core-hour numbers elsewhere in this file; the corpus already holds LUMI with a similar Swiss-door restriction. What would settle a reachable verdict is whether a non-Swiss collaborator can be attached to a Swiss PI's project, which the production page implies for collaborations but the small and preparatory pages do not address.
Evidence rung	documented
Checked	2026-10-22 (live); stale on 2026-11-21

Evidence (5)

date	source	what it proved
2026-10-22	www.cscs.ch/user-lab/allocation-schemes/small-projects	"Small projects may request up to 8'000 node hours on Alps"; "limited to a one-year duration"; "A maximum of five accounts is allowed per small project", quoted
2026-10-22	www.cscs.ch/user-lab/allocation-schemes/small-projects	"Small projects are intended for applicants from the Swiss user community"; "Proposers must hold at least a postdoctoral position at an academic institution. PhD students cannot apply independently", quoted
2026-10-22	www.cscs.ch/user-lab/allocation-schemes/preparatory-projects	"Preparatory Projects are allocated a total of 250 node hours over 3 months on the HPC vCluster on Alps", quoted
2026-10-22	docs.cscs.ch/policies/	"resources at CSCS are assigned over three-months windows"; unused resources "are forever lost", quoted
2026-10-22	www.cscs.ch/user-lab/allocation-schemes/production-projects	"International applications (and collaborations) will be accepted only if proposers and their teams are affiliated with academic institutions", quoted

More fields (1)

{
 "wave2": {
  "class": "national-hpc",
  "free_tier_kind": "continuous-small-allocation",
  "shape": {
   "vcpu": null,
   "ram_gib": null,
   "gpu_class": "NVIDIA GH200 (Alps)",
   "gpu_count": 1
  }
 }
}

Unknown or withheld values (10)

$.egress.metered egress-unknown
$.egress.terms not-stated
$.identity_cost.detail process
$.interface interface-unknown
$.per_object_cap.notes process
$.per_object_cap.stated not-applicable
$.reliability_note none-observed
$.retention.notes process
$.retention.stated not-applicable
$.tooling not-stated