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CSCS Small
www.cscs.ch/user-lab/allocation-schemes/small-projectsNational HPC allocationcompute/cscs-smallJSONcomparereport an errorprovider JSON
- Free allowance
- "Small projects may request up to 8'000 node hours on Alps.
- Verdict
- fails: identitythe identity required is not reachable without it
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- institutionno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- 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...
- Evidence
- documented5 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-22checked 2026-10-22 (live); stale on 2026-11-22
| 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 |
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| Price | none stated |
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| Limits | - write-gated (binding) "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
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| Identity | institution not published |
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| Egress | not stated |
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| Interface | unknown inferred from the tooling the provider documents; not probed |
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| Tooling | not stated |
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| 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. |
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| Reliability | no reliability event recorded |
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| Notes | 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 record. |
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| Parsed numbers | |
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Evidence 5
More fields 1
| facets | {"class": "national-hpc","free_tier_kind": "continuous-small-allocation","shape": {"vcpu": null,"ram_gib": null,"gpu_class": "NVIDIA GH200 (Alps)","gpu_count": 1}} |
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Unknown values 7
- egress metered: egress metering was not published
- egress terms: a source was read and is silent on this field
- interface: the access interface was not established
- per object cap stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
- reliability note: nothing of this kind was observed
- retention stated: the field does not apply to this kind of offer
- tooling: a source was read and is silent on this field