Peer Review Portal

Overview

Funding agencies, research infrastructures and computing centres often hand out resources through calls: researchers and companies apply, experts review the proposals, and a panel decides. Waldur runs that process from the call to the allocation, and turns each decision into a project with its resources on the providers’ systems.

  • Calls with rounds, each with the proposal fields and documents it asks for, and who may see and apply to it.
  • An evaluation workflow per call: steps such as an administrative check, a technical assessment, scientific review and a panel, each with its criteria.
  • Reviewers in pools with expertise profiles, suggested for each proposal from their expertise, with bids and assignment in batches.
  • Conflicts of interest declared through disclosure forms and detected automatically, before a reviewer sees a proposal.
  • Decisions turned into allocations: an accepted proposal becomes a project, with its members' roles and the resources it was awarded.
  • Applicants sign in with eduGAIN, MyAccessID or their company account, and follow each proposal from draft to decision.
  • Dashboards and exports for call managers: proposals, reviews and decisions per call and round.

In the portal

The call manager's view: a call's evaluation steps, its proposals and their reviews.
Open calls as an applicant sees them, each with its own rounds.
Open calls as an applicant sees them, each with its own rounds.
A call's terms and how its proposals are evaluated, with the open round and the way to apply.
A call's terms and how its proposals are evaluated, with the open round and the way to apply.
An applicant's proposals and where each one stands.
An applicant's proposals and where each one stands.
The allocation an accepted proposal became, with GPU-hours and CPU-hours used against its limits.
The allocation an accepted proposal became, with GPU-hours and CPU-hours used against its limits.

Recorded on a demo deployment: the organizations, people and numbers are made up.

Access modes

Calls differ in size, review and turnaround, and Waldur runs them side by side. Programs such as the EuroHPC AI Factories, for example, offer an entry-level mode for first experiments, a fast mode for experienced users with requests reviewed as they arrive, and a large-scale mode with cut-off dates and peer review. Each mode can be its own call, with its own rounds, workflow, reviewers and offerings.

How Waldur fits

The call managing organization runs the calls in Waldur. Providers, such as HPC centres, AI factories or cloud operators, offer their resources to the calls as offerings. Once a proposal is accepted, the awarded resources are ordered on the providers’ systems like any other order, through their APIs or the Waldur Site Agent, and their use is reported back per project.

What stays with other systems

  • The scientific judgement is the reviewers’ and the panel’s. Waldur organizes the process, records every step and enforces the rules set for it.

Further reading

Implementation

A rollout usually starts with one call that already exists on paper, so the workflow can be checked against how it is run today.

Project phases

  1. Call design

    Describe a current call in Waldur, with its rounds, proposal form, workflow steps and criteria.

  2. Reviewers and conflicts

    Build the reviewer pool and its expertise profiles, and set the conflict-of-interest rules.

  3. Providers and resources

    Connect the providers whose resources the call awards, and the offerings applicants can request.

  4. Pilot round

    Run one round with a small group of applicants and reviewers, and adjust the workflow.

  5. Production launch

    Open the calls to all applicants, with sign-in, notifications and reports in place.

Running calls for proposals?

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