The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) is pleased to announce the recipients of the initial 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 the movement of microorganisms through the human body, the status of koala habitats in Eastern Australia, and the toxicity of newly engineered nanoparticles.
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 initial round of the Adapter Scheme will provide 39 researchers from 16 universities access to around 10 million units of computing time on NCI.
NCI Director Professor Sean Smith said, “This new allocation scheme provides more Australian researchers access to powerful computing resources. The Adapter grants will enable scientists from a wide range of disciplines and with a huge variety of computational approaches to get their work done and increase the scope of their ambition.”
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 Professor Ravi Jagadeeshan from Monash University will be using his allocation to support the computational work of PhD student Silpa Mariya.
“The code we are using has been tested and benchmarked on the Monash computing cluster and the completion of the project now requires production runs involving a short burst of intense high-performance computing. This computational project will use polymer physics models to simulate the motion of a bacteriophage in the mucosal network of the human body. Understanding how phages behave within the mucosal surface has broad implications for the fields of gut microbiome and health.”
Successful recipient Dr Eireni Goudeli from the University of Melbourne says, "NCI’s Adapter scheme will enable us to compute the leaching rate of nanosilver, a component in a variety of consumer products, in aqueous solutions at various pH. We will investigate the mechanisms that are responsible for the toxicity of engineered nanoparticles.”
The Adapter Scheme is one of three merit-based allocation schemes available to all Australian researchers. At the other end of the scale, the Australasian Leadership Computing Grants cater to the biggest, most ambitious computational science in the country with several individual allocations up to 50 million units of computing time. The National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme, due to open in September for 2023 allocations, 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, Skills and Employment.
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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