The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) is today announcing the recipients of the Quarter 2 2023 round of the Adapter Allocation Scheme, our most flexible scheme enabling increased access to high-performance computing resources for highly meritorious early career and established researchers.
The successful recipients will be receiving computing resources to study topics including flood mitigation in the Noosa river basin, the properties of drug resistant bacteria, and the role of genetics in koala chlamydial disease.
The Adapter Scheme provides access to resources across NCI’s computational platforms: one of Australia’s most powerful supercomputers, Gadi, the powerful, simple-to-use and widely available Nirin cloud computer, and the 100 Petabyte Gdata global file storage systems.
This round of the Adapter Scheme will provide 43 research teams from 16 universities and research institutes access to more than 9 million units of computing time on NCI.
NCI Director Professor Sean Smith said, “Early career researchers and postdoctoral students are applying to the Adapter Scheme in increasing numbers, with 25 successfully receiving grants of computing time this quarter. The breadth of science topics and disciplines being conducted through the Scheme is a testament to the creativity, expertise and diversity of NCI’s users.”
Successful Adapter Scheme recipient Dr Belinda Wright from The University of Sydney will be using her allocation to investigate the role of host genetics in chlamydial disease and vaccination in koalas.
She says, “The NCI Adapter Scheme provides the vital compute resources needed for our research, which uses a whole genome approach to better understand variation among koalas in their response to chlamydia infection and vaccination. Our results will guide conservation efforts targeting this important koala pathogen, which is currently a major contributor to population declines.”
The Adapter Scheme is one of the three merit-based allocation schemes available to all Australian researchers at NCI. 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 funds the vast majority of the merit-based access to supercomputing resources in Australia, with around 200 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.
