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Notice Board (last updated: 25th January 2024) contact us

The purpose of this website is to help with the administratrial aspects of the MCC. If you want to learn more about the MCC, please visit http://mcc.hec.ac.uk.

Rules on who can and how to join the MCC - Info for how members can get an account

Materials Chemistry Annual Conference Our seventh conference will take place July 3rd-5th 2024 in Daresbury. This year we will devote one session to celebrating 30 years of the MCC.

Allocations: The new tighter constraints imposed on HEC consortia during phase 2 (cf phase 1) of total usage on ARCHER has resulted in a modified timetable of MCC meetings, and therefore lengths over which individual projects should 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 Meetings: online, Tuesday 30th January 2024 (Agenda). The format of these meetings held every January will follow a similar format (with the committee meeting taking place in the previous week, after which we aim to email any queries raised to individuals concerned before the start of the main meeting with the aim of addressing all queries by the end of January).
Summer General Meetings: The next meeting will follow on from our Conference, i.e. Friday 5th July 2024 (Agenda). The format of this meeting will follow a similar format to that used previously when held in-person at UCL, and more details will be confirmed later. The committee meeting will take place in the previous week, after which we intend to email any queries raised to individuals concerned before the start of the main meeting with the aim of addressing all queries by the end of July.

General Applications from full MCC members for HEC resources for the period: 1st February 2024 to 31st July 2024. Please assume that we have the same allocation for this six-month period to distribute as compared with the current six-month allocation period for GW4, YOUNG and ARCHER2. Please justify any significant increases (e.g., group has expanded). We also hope to have an opportunity for several grand challenge projects - details will be sent directly to MCC members (group leaders) once we know the level of requests from the standard proposals.

Call opens: 1st January 2024
Call ends: 4pm Monday 15th January 2024

As usual, proposals should use the standard template and be sent to klmc.mcc@ucl.ac.uk with one completed group summary form (see Applications for national HPC time). 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. Within the group summary form, your group members requiring access to any time allocated must be listed in the table as I will be removing all connections at the end of this current period. Recent publications, qualifications and destinations of your group (which/who benefited from access to ARCHER2/YOUNG/GW4) 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 need to compete an annual report to EPSRC in January and also 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. Do not include what you submit for the Grand Challenge Project in your total for Group Request.
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 (template has not changed)

a) Enter requests in units of kAU (using 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 1/2", "2" for YOUNG and "3" for GW4 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 Word 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).


Interim Applications from full MCC members for HEC resources for the period: 1st November 2023 to 31st January 2024. We have some resources for Grand Challenge Projects on ARCHER2 and Standard Projects on YOUNG. If interested, please use the standard proposal form (no need for a group summary) and submit within the following deadlines:

Call opens: 1st September 2023
Call ends: midday Friday 13th October 2023


Acknowledgements: When publishing work that benefited from resources allocated by the MCC: please include the following acknowledgment 'Via our membership of the UK's HEC Materials Chemistry Consortium, which is funded by EPSRC (EP/X035859), this work used the ' followed by the appropriate acknowledgement: 'ARCHER2 UK National Supercomputing Service (http://www.archer2.ac.uk).' for ARCHER2, 'the UK Materials and Molecular Modelling Hub for computational resources, MMM Hub, which is partially funded by EPSRC (EP/T022213)' for YOUNG, and 'the UK Materials and Molecular Modelling Hub for computational resources, MMM Hub, which is partially funded by EPSRC (EP/W032260)' for the GPU nodes of YOUNG.

If space is limited, please ensure the name of the HEC platform, the phrase "Materials Chemistry Consortium" and *most importantly* any relevant EPSRC grant numbers are acknowledged.

For posters and talks, please include our logo.

All published work supported by CoSeC (software support of DL_POLY, ChemShell, Crystal, for example) should carry the following acknowledgment: 'This work made use of computational support by CoSeC, the Computational Science Centre for Research Communities, which was made available through our membership of the MCC HEC'. You may want to add any relevant CCP, or example' and CCP5'

When searching the literature, older work may include references to "THOMAS", "HECToR" and "HPCx" and refer to funding by EPSRC with grant references of EP/P020194 for THOMAS, and EP/D504872, EP/F067496, EP/L000202, EP/R029431 for Tier-1 HPC resources.


Themed and Special Issues of MCC work: We have periodically organised a special issue of a high quality journal in order to help showcase the quality and board range of research undertaken by members, which required the use of HEC resources. Hyperlinks to these are given below on the right hand side under links to a list of our publications. A big thank you to all members who submitted manuscript(s) to these special issues.

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Resources Documents (restricted access) Agenda July 13 2021, 10:30-15:00 Example agendas: Agenda January 25 2021, 10:00-15:30 July 20 July 18 Dec 16 July 16 July 15 July 14 Apr 14 May 13 Oct 11 Nov 10 May 10 Dec 03 How members can get an account on ARCHER2 or YOUNG

MCC Outputs ARCHER (2013-18) Hector (2007-13) HPCx (2003-06) CSAR (2000-03) Destinations Presentations (2007-2013) An alternative photographic insight

Publications 2015-20 and Pre-2015 Special/Themed Issues Roy Proc A July 2023 (381) 2250 click here PCCP 16 2014 Roy Proc A July 2011 Overview Contents J Mat Chem 16 20 2006 Overview Contents (1.6Mb)