Call Advanced Computing Projects (6th ed) - A1 (round A)

The Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) seeks to aggregate national advanced computing resources, promoting cooperation between the various centres involved and developing national and international partnerships with other entities. Under the terms of the Advanced Computing Projects Regulation, published under no. 10/2022 in the Diário da República, the allocation of national computing resources is made following a tender procedure whose terms are published on the FCT website.

The beneficiaries, individually or in co-promotion are:

• R&D (Research and Development) institutions;
• Collaborative laboratories;
• Technological interface centers;
• Science and technology infrastructures;
• Science and technology networks and consortia;
• Private non-profit institutions whose main objective is R&D activities;
• Digital Innovation Hubs;
• Other public and private non-profit institutions that develop or participate in research, development, or innovation activities;
• Companies developing advanced computing projects in research, development or innovation activities;
• Individuals operating in Portugal and who wish to develop advanced computing projects in any scientific area.

Regarding applications from companies as beneficiaries, the advanced computing projects should:

• occur within the scope of pre-competitive research and innovation, without market value;
• not exceed 50% of the total computational allocation to be allocated in this call.

• High Performance Computing (HPC)
• Artificial Intelligence Computing (IA)
• Scientific Cloud Computing (SCC)

These advanced computational models aim to support applications in various areas, such as bioinformatics, climate, materials and life science, computational chemistry, physics, and civil engineering, among others, thus supporting research and enhancing the competitiveness of the national industry.

• A0 – Experimental Access recommended for teams with no previous experience or history of using computational resources to test and explore the available HPC, AI, Cloud or visualisation resources for 6 months.
• A1 – Development Access recommended for software performance testing, code optimisation, scalability testing, benchmarking, re-factoring for 3 - 12 months.
• A2 – Regular Access recommended for scientific or innovation projects whose team has consolidated previous experience and needs resources in Deucalion, MareNostrum 5 and Cirrus+Stratus platforms for 12 months.
• A3 - Larger Access recommended for scientific or innovation projects whose team has consolidated previous experience and require larger amounts of resources on the Deucalion or MareNostrum 5 platforms for 12 months.

Under the terms of Articles 14 and 15 of the Advanced Computing Project Regulations and in accordance with the call notice and evaluation guide, all A1 applications will only be submitted for validation of technical suitability by the technical teams operating the computing platforms in accordance with the following simplified criteria:

• T1: Technical suitability to the computational resources 
• T2: Computational resources reasonableness 
• T3: Work Plan

This validation is based on the qualitative classification of "accepted" and "not accepted", with no final score being calculated. Accepted applications will be dealt with in rounds and on a first-come, first-served basis until the defined quota is exhausted.

Applications for the A1 access type must be submitted in English on a form on the myFCT platform.

At the end of the deadline, applications will be validated for their technical suitability and then allocated to the platforms. If the quota of resources is not used up in this batch, new batches of submissions will be opened according to the schedule:

Round of applications | Submission dates

A | 10 September 2025 (5pm) - 10 November 2025 (5pm)

B | 10 November 2025 (5pm) - 15 January 2026 (5pm)

C | 15 January 2026 (5pm) - 15 March 2026 (5pm)

D | 15 March 2026 (5pm) - 15 May 2026 (5pm)

E | 15 May 2026 (5pm) - 15 September 2026 (5pm)

Important note: The following limits defined in the call for proposals apply:

• Limits for A1 applications: Each IR can submit a maximum of ONE application in each typology, subject to the availability of resources (see point 9 of the call notice).
• Resource limit for A1 projects: 100.000 CPU core.hours, 5.000 GPU.hours, maximum duration of 12 months (see point 3.2 of the call notice).

Information about applications can be requested through the email address: [email protected] 

No information published on this page replaces or supersedes the Regulations and the Call Notice.