Australia’s national supercomputing facilities — the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) in Canberra and the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre in Perth — record unprecedented demand for compute time in their 2026 National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme (NCMAS).
NCMAS is a national meritorious grant scheme for access to high-performance computing (HPC) resources. The two Tier-1 HPC facilities in Australia together offer hundreds of millions of hours of computing time to researchers.
This year’s demand highlights the growing need for high-performance computing (HPC) in driving innovative science across Australia.
Unprecedented Demand Across Both Centres
This year, a total of 245 applications were received for NCMAS among both supercomputing centres. The collective demand of more than 2.2 billion compute hours, exceeded the annual NCMAS compute share on Gadi and Setonix by nearly 3 times, highlighting NCMAS’s critical role in national research. Demand for each facility exceeds 1 billion compute hours for the first time.
“Access to high-performance computing at national scale is essential for Australian researchers,” said Mark Stickells, CEO of the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre.
“From climate science to drug discovery and AI, researchers are using HPC to tackle national challenges and drive innovation,” he said.
Echoing this sentiment, Professor Andrew Rohl, Director of NCI, added, “This year’s NCMAS call saw researchers request over three times NCI’s capacity, the highest ever, demonstrating the critical importance and growing demand for national high-performance computing resources.”
Research Areas Driving Demand
NCI and Pawsey both saw strong demand across engineering, chemical, physical, biological, and earth sciences, reflecting shared national research priorities.
At NCI, submissions spanned fluid and thermal engineering, materials engineering, computational chemistry, climate and geophysical modelling, bioinformatics, computational biology, astronomy, machine learning, biomedical research, and agriculture.
Pawsey’s applications came from many of the same domains – engineering, theoretical and computational chemistry, condensed matter physics, astronomy, agriculture, agricultural biotechnology, and geophysics – with a growing interest in information and computing sciences, and smaller contributions from agricultural, veterinary, food, and mathematical sciences.
Together, the application patterns highlighted broad overlap across core research areas, complemented by each centre’s distinct emerging fields. Meanwhile, over 60 government and university partner projects applied through Pawsey’s Partner Allocation Scheme, with requests surpassing available capacity by 1.6 times for CPU and 1.4 times for GPU resources.
The inaugural Setonix-Q pilot, which provides NCMAS researchers access to quantum-classical hybrid computing, also saw strong demand demonstrating Australian researchers’ growing readiness to integrate quantum computing into real-world science.
The Power Behind the Research
At the heart of this demand are Australia’s two Tier-1 systems: Gadi at NCI and Setonix at Pawsey, delivering more than 80 petaflops of peak performance through hybrid CPU-GPU architectures that align with modern global research standards. Together, they provide the secure, sovereign capability required to model national priorities at scale, from climate resilience and energy transitions to health, critical minerals, and more.
Gadi offers one of the Southern Hemisphere’s largest CPU-focused research platforms, integrated with NVIDIA GPUs and more than 100 petabytes of high-speed storage. Setonix complements this with highly energy-efficient and large GPU capacity and state-of-the-art CPUs. Setonix is recognised as the most energy efficient and powerful supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere.
2026 also sees the debut of Pawsey Setonix-Q, a quantum-classical pilot providing researchers with early access to quantum hardware. Collectively, these systems ensure Australia maintains world-class research capability, supports strategic decision-making, and strengthens national competitiveness.
Looking Ahead
NCMAS projects are assessed based on scientific excellence, national impact, and technical readiness.
Globally, demand for supercomputing continues to accelerate, Japan’s Fugaku delivers roughly seven times Australia’s capacity, and Singapore has announced new systems that will double its national resources. These international benchmarks from our region highlight the growing scale of computational demand and provide context for Australia’s research infrastructure landscape.
About NCI and Pawsey
The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) and the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre are Australia’s two Tier-1 high-performance computing facilities under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS). Together, they deliver world-class computing, cloud, and data services and expertise that empower discovery and innovation across all domains of Australian science and technology.
NCI and Pawsey support more than 7,500 users across 80 universities and research institutions, 14 Commonwealth agencies, and 12 NCRIS facilities, underpinning over 4,000 research projects and $800 million in competitive funding enabling discoveries ranging from cosmic simulations and climate prediction to genomic breakthroughs.
Supported by the Australian Government through NCRIS, Pawsey and NCI together form the backbone of Australia’s sovereign research computing capability.
Mark Stickells, Pawsey CEO.
Professor Andrew Rohl, Director of NCI.
Setonix, Pawsey's supercomputer.
Gadi, NCI's supercomputer.
