National Computational Infrastructure

Providing Australian researchers with world-class high-end computing services

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News

16 October 2009

Merit Allocation Scheme - 3rd notice

Applications are now sought for the Merit Allocation Scheme (MAS) of National Computational Infrastructure (NCI, www.nci.org.au) which provides Australian researchers with access to world-class high-end computing services.

This call seeks applications from researchers in universities and publicly funded research organisations (covered by the NCRIS Capabilities) for computational resources (processor time and related data storage) on the NCI National Facility (http://nf.nci.org.au). Under the MAS, resources are allocated to researchers on merit through a process which assesses applications on their research quality and computational requirements and needs.

In 2010, the facilities that will be available are:

  • the new peak system - a Sun Constellation Cluster (vayu) with 11936 cores.
  • the SGI Altix XE 1300 (xe) with 1248 cores.

Access under the MAS is provided for by Commonwealth (NCRIS) funding and thus researchers provided with resources under this scheme are not charged by NCI for the services provided. For 2010, the value of these resources is approximately $0.12 per core hour, an amount which can be stated as an in-kind contribution to research granting bodies (e.g., ARC, NHMRC).

The closing date for applications is Monday, November 9.

All applications are completed online using a form which is available at http://nf.nci.org.au/accounts/.

NCI’s advanced computing infrastructure, comprising a petascale HPC system, a large-scale compute cloud (primarily for data-intensive services), and multi-petabyte high-performance storage, is funded through programs of the Department of Industry, Innovation, Climate Change, Science, Research and Tertiary Education, while its operations are sustained through the substantial co-investment by a number of partner organisations including ANU, CSIRO, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, Geoscience Australia and a number of Australia’s research-intensive universities through the Australian Research Council.

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