Specialised Facilities

In addition to the NCI National Facility, high-end computational research in Australia is serviced by a number of regional and discipline/application-specific installations, a number of which provide services tailored to the needs of particular research communities.

Through the Specialised Facilities (SF) program, NCI seeks to extend the range of high-end services available through its Merit Allocation Scheme by acquiring access, through subcontract agreements, to specialised facilities and services, particularly application/discipline areas for which a demonstrated need exists.

Following a call for expressions of interest in the latter half of 2008, the NCI Steering Committee has approved an allocation of $2.4M to invest (equally) in two facilities:

• Specialised Facility in Bioinformatics, hosted by a consortium led by the University of Queensland.
• Specialised Facility in Imaging and Visualisation, hosted by a consortium led by Monash University.

The services that are being invested will continue for a period of three years from January 2011.