The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) is today announcing the recipients of the Quarter 4 2022 round of the Adapter Allocation Scheme, our newest and most flexible scheme to support highly meritorious Australian computational science. The successful recipients will be receiving computing resources to study topics including Antarctic sea ice, alternative battery technologies and platypus genetics.
The Adapter Scheme is a merit-based scheme providing quarterly access to resources across NCI’s computational platforms: the Southern Hemisphere’s largest supercomputer Gadi, the powerful, simple-to-use and widely available Nirin cloud computer, and the 70+ Petabyte Gdata global file storage systems. This round of the Adapter Scheme will provide 32 research teams from 15 universities access to around 7 million units of computing time on NCI.
NCI Director Professor Sean Smith said, “As the Adapter Allocation Scheme grows, we are starting to see a great variety of scientific projects being proposed. These Adapter grants will enable both early career researchers and established scientists from a wide range of disciplines and computational approaches to perform exciting and transformative research.”
The Adapter Scheme is designed to identify meritorious research projects that need flexible compute access over a short period. Through the Adapter Scheme, NCI also aims to support new users and early career researchers to gain access and experience on the country’s leading high-performance computing platforms.
Successful Adapter Scheme recipient Associate Professor Luke Bennetts from the University of Adelaide will be using his allocation to perform high-resolution simulations of Antarctic sea ice dynamics during storms.
He says, “Our project aims to improve understanding of Antarctic sea ice’s dynamic response to polar cyclones, particularly in the highly mobile marginal ice zone at the outskirts of the ice cover. The Adapter scheme gives us the opportunity to run simulations at high resolution and over multiple years to underpin a statistical analysis of the outputs, and progress towards inclusion of the latest sea ice modelling developments into Australia’s next generation ocean–sea ice model.”
The Adapter Scheme is one of three merit-based allocation schemes available to all Australian researchers at NCI. At the other end of the scale, the Australasian Leadership Computing Grants cater to the biggest, most ambitious computational science in the country with a small number of allocations up to 50 million units of computing time. The National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme, now open for allocations in 2023, funds the vast majority of the merit-based access to supercomputing resources in Australia, with around 250 recipients each year across the major Australian supercomputing facilities. NCI is continuing to develop the availability and range of the merit allocation schemes to better support nationally significant research with world-class computing infrastructure.
The Adapter Scheme is supported by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy from the Department of Education.
For more information about the Adapter Scheme and to view a list of all recipients, visit the Adapter Scheme page on the NCI website.
About NCI
NCI Australia powers leadership-class computing and data science for Australia. Based at The Australian National University, it brings together the Australian Government, universities, national science agencies and industry. NCI’s Major Collaborators are The Australian National University, CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, Geoscience Australia and the University of New South Wales.
NCI website: https://nci.org.au/
Supercomputing systems: https://nci.org.au/our-systems/hpc-systems
How to access NCI: https://nci.org.au/users/how-access-nci
Our latest publications: https://nci.org.au/media/publications
NCI training calendar: https://opus.nci.org.au/display/Help/NCI+Training+and+Educational+Events
