Section 3bis. Your virtual visit

HPC-Europa is a research visit programme, and therefore we principally support on-site visits.

However, under our new contract with the EC, beginning on 1st January 2009 (and with the first closing date on 15th November), we will support a certain number of so-called "virtual visits".

These "virtual vists" will be for people who wish to use our High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities purely remotely, without travelling to one of the partner countries.

However, we must emphasise that, as with the on-site visits, access to HPC facilities is only one of the criteria for a visit, and equally important, even in the case of "virtual visits" is that there should be scientific collaboration with a researcher in a similar field in the country where the HPC centre is located.

The chosen "host" researcher will be asked to complete a statement of support for the application, so the collaborative aspect is a real consideration.

Therefore, "virtual visits" are most likely to be suited to two types of people:

- researchers who have already carried out an HPC-Europa visit in the past, and have therefore already worked with an HPC-Europa host;

- researchers who for any other reason have an existing collaboration with a researcher in one of the 7 countries (Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK).

There may be other situations where a "virtual visit" is appropriate, and so we will consider all applications for "virtual visits", but you should be aware that these are the most likely scenarios for a "virtual" visitor to be accepted.