The National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme is Australia’s premiere grant scheme for access to high-performance computing (HPC) resources. The two Tier-1 HPC facilities in Australia, the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) and the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, together offer hundreds of millions of hours of computing time to meritorious researchers.

NCMAS provides access, based on research and computational merit, for researchers at Australian universities and publicly funded research agencies, to resources at the major national HPC facilities.

Key dates

Dates	Milestone
15 August 2022	Applications open
3 October 2022	Applications close at 7:00pm AEST (5:00pm AWST)
30 Nov, 1-2 December 2022	Allocation Committee meeting
12 December 2022	Allocations announced
1 Jan 2023	Access to allocations commences

APPLY FOR NCMAS HERE

Eligibility

An applicant (Lead CI) must be based in Australia and hold a substantive position at an Australian university, research institute, or Government science agency, with appointment at 0.2 FTE or greater.The primary applicant (Lead CI) must have a track record of research funding via ARC, NHMRC, or industry funding scheme.

There are three NCMAS Application Categories:

Open (Unrestricted)
Early Career Researcher (ECR)
Special Consideration

ECR and Special Consideration allocations are the minimum allocation of the requested facility. ECR or Special Consideration applications must request compute on one HPC facility only.

Pawsey compute resources available in 2023

System	Total Allocation (kSU)	Equivalent Core Hours
Setonix CPU	295,000	295,000,000
Setonix GPU	160,000	275,000,000*

All references to computational resources in NCMAS supporting documentation will be in units of kilo-service-units; 1 kSU = 1,000 service units (SU).
* AMD GPU Compute Unit (CU) hours, with 220 Compute Units per single AMD MI250X GPU

Supporting Documentation

Further supporting information for your NCMAS application can be found here https://my.nci.org.au/mancini/ncmas/2023/

Changes in Pawsey’s Supercomputing Services for 2023

There have been some key changes to Pawsey’s Supercomputing Services for 2023 and we invite all researchers to read the summary of main changes to Pawsey supercomputing services in 2023, including changes in allocation schemes: https://support.pawsey.org.au/documentation/display/US/Changes+in+Supercomputing+Services+for+2023

For any further queries or information, please contact help@pawsey.org.au