Guidance for HEC applications from MCC members (last updated: 26th August 2025)
Allocations: The new tighter constraints imposed on HEC consortia during phase 2 (cf phase 1) of total usage on ARCHER resulted in a modified timetable of MCC meetings, and therefore lengths over which individual projects run. Importantly, any resources left at the end of June and December is lost and our total usage should be at a constant rate. This is imposed to discourage hording that leads to long queues near the end of an allocation period. The MCC applies the policy that any individual budget deemed to be underused may be reduced to maximise the benefit of ARCHER2 to our community. Likewise, time allocation periods on YOUNG is outside of our control; so the same rules apply here accept that allocation periods typically change on the first working Monday January, April, July, and October. Pro-rata gold will be allocated in each time period. We will be especially critical (and proactive) if MCC's total spend on either ARCHER2 or YOUNG is below that expected.
Winter General Meeting: online towards the end of January, with the committee meeting taking place in the previous week.
Summer General Meeting: hybrid and immediately follows our Annual Conference in Daresbury during July.
General Applications from full MCC members for HEC resources for the period: [a] 1st February to 31st July and [b] 1st August to 31st January
Please assume that we have the same allocation for each six-month period to distribute for YOUNG and ARCHER2. For more guidance click here.
Call opens: First work day in [a] January and [b] June
Call ends: 4pm third Thursday in [a] January and [b] June
Note that we will have the same budget to distribute on both ARCHER2 and YOUNG and, given there was an overdemand from standard proposals in the current allocatio period, there will be no more GC calls and any increase in a group's total request will need to be fully justified as we do not have any headroom for significant increases. As always, all proposals received will be posted online for the MCC committee and any member to review - please send questions and comments you have to our mcc inbox. Once the science and justification for requests have been approved, then if there is a small overdemand I will apply a small scaling and later try to find the remaining CU from any underspend; if there is a large overdemand then the MCC committee will be asked to help find where to make reductions that will cause the least impact.
Proposals should use the standard template and be sent to klmc.mcc@ucl.ac.uk with one completed group summary spreadsheet (see Applications for national HPC time). Note that from the beginning of 2025, the group summary form is a spreadsheet. If submitting more than one proposal within a theme, please concatenate the proposals in that theme into one document so that the first page contains the proposal requesting the most time resources, followed, on a new page, by the next most time resource request, etc. Recent publications, qualifications and destinations of your group (which/who benefited from access to ARCHER2/YOUNG) are NOT required in this form but should be added to our google form. The information for the google forms is no longer required on the proposals nor on the group summary form but is very important this information is up-to-date as we may need to compete an annual report to EPSRC and this information is used in our completion of Researchfish. To help in this endeavour we also require an annual summary per theme from each group by the end of October using this template, where additional information and instructions can also be found.
Please note:
a) Within "justification for resources" please use CU and Gold as units for Archer2 and Young, respectively.
b) For "Total CU or Gold (MAU) request" near the top of your proposal, please also enter MAU within brackets after the request in CU or Gold. Use the following exchange rates: 1 CU = 1.5156k AU and 66.7 Gold = 1k AU. For example, if you request 500 CU, then please write 5,000 CU (7.578M AU).
c) The line for Group Cap etc. has changed to "Group Request (MAU)", "Previous Group Allocation(MAU)", and "If request much greater or less than previous request, please provide brief details why", as going forward we want to be more flexible to members' needs.
d) Submit as a pdf (for uploading onto our website) uisng the correct filename, which starts with the theme and ends with your group code. For example, if your group code is xyz and the theme is power, then the filename will be power-xyz.pdf
A few reminders when completing the group summary form (which is now a spreadsheet)
a) Enter requests in units of kAU (the spreadsheet will use the following exchange rates: 1 CU = 1.5156k AU and 66.7 Gold = 1k AU)
b) If you request gold and CU for a project, then enter the name of the project twice (once for each request)
c) To request ARCHER2 time enter "1" within the column headed "Tier", and "2" for YOUNG requests
d) Do not include carriage returns as these will cause a problem when merging group summary forms (which, if not spotted, will result in no time resources appearing in the column I use to allocate resources
e) Submit as a Excel document (for easy merging into our Master document)
Finally, in January of each year, please remember to update the Google Docs with details of publications, qualifications gained (MSc and PhDs) and destinations (UKRI are keen to learn about careers of our team members).