The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) is today announcing the recipients of the Quarter 1 2023 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 congenital heart disease, the mechanisms behind a hail hotspot and algae evolution.

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 34 research teams from 15 universities access to more than 7 million units of computing time on NCI.

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The logo for the Adapter scheme, with NCI in the background

NCI Director Professor Sean Smith said, “As the Adapter Allocation Scheme grows, the quality of proposals and the breadth of science is increasing. 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 Senior Postdoctoral Research Dr Emma Rath from the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute will be using her allocation to apply novel DNA analysis techniques to increase the diagnostic rate of congenital heart disease.

She says, “We will apply novel emerging DNA analysis techniques to increase the diagnostic rate of congenital heart disease, so that doctors can better manage those patients. NCI provides the large memory processing capacity and large Australian medical DNA database so that we can carry out these analyses.

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 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.

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.

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