D2.3: Report on PRACE 2, TNA and DECI Year 2

This deliverable reports on three main activities of Work Package 2 (WP2) during the second reporting period of the PRACE-5IP project:

• Status of PRACE 2 development;
• Analysis of PRACE compliance with the Trans-National Access mechanism;
• Analysis of the DECI (Distributed European Computing Initiative) process.

The reporting on the PRACE 2 status within the PRACE Implementation Phase projects was initiated during PRACE-4IP (D2.2 “Second Report on PRACE 2.0 Development”), continued during PRACE-5IP first project year (D2.1 “Report on PRACE 2, TNA, DECI and KPIs Year 1”, M16) and this deliverable provides an update on the activities of the second year of the PRACE-5IP project. It reports on the status of the implementation and developments in the Second Period of operations of the PRACE pan-European Research Infrastructure, called PRACE 2, that succeeds between 2017 and 2020 the PRACE agreement for the Initial Period (referred to as PRACE 1 in this deliverable).
The Trans-National Access (TNA) topic became a topic of interest for PRACE during the PRACE-5IP project proposal and was addressed for the first time in deliverable D2.1 mentioned above. The objective of the analysis carried out by WP2 and reported in D2.1 was to evaluate if the current processes in PRACE are compliant with the TNA conditions set by the EC as a funding mechanisms for infrastructures offering access to their services to researchers across Europe. The conclusion of that analysis is that access to PRACE resources is already compatible with the Rules for providing Trans-National Access to Research Infrastructures of H2020 (Article 16 of the Model Grant Agreement). To finalise the TNA exercise, this deliverable will report on the Tier-0 allocations, during the PRACE-5IP project.
A further topic of interest in PRACE-5IP is the DECI process. This deliverable is an update of the DECI report from D2.1, focusing this time on the WP2 analysis related to possible actions that could be implemented in DECI towards improving the process and thus better serving academic and industrial Tier-1 users.