The National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme (NCMAS) is Australia’s premier meritorious allocation scheme, spanning both national peak facilities as well as specialised compute facilities across the nation.
The NCMAS is open to the Australian research community, providing significant amounts of compute time for meritorious research projects.
The NCMAS is administered by the NCMAS secretariat.
Please find below the link to the NCMAS application portal. Please refer to the official NCMAS communication about the opening and closing dates of the call. Further information is available at https://ncmas.nci.org.au. |
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The NCMAS is one of the Merit Allocation Schemes available on Setonix. Researchers can apply for allocations on Setonix CPU and Setonix GPU.
Resources available and minimum allocation sizes are presented in table 1.
Table 1. Available resources and minimum request size
Scheme | Request full year | |
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National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme | Scheme total capacity | 485M Service Units Total:
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Minimum request size | 1M Service Units |
There is no maximum limit to the amount of time that can be requested. However, partial allocations may be awarded depending on the availability and demand for allocations within the scheme.
Note that 1M core hours in a year is approximately the equivalent of using a single Setonix CPU node. Applications for such small allocations must specify why access to a supercomputer is necessary for the research, and based on the scoring criteria below such uses of the supercomputer are unlikely to be competitive against other applications that demonstrate they need the expensive interconnect. Nimbus Documentation is better suited to single-node applications and has a lightweight application process.
Other non-Pawsey resources are available under the NCMAS including NCI's Gadi supercomputer.
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With Setonix, Pawsey is moving from an exclusive node usage to a proportional node usage accounting model. While the Service Unit (SU) is still mapped to the hourly usage of CPU cores, users are not charged for whole nodes irrespective of whether they are been fully utilised. With the proportional node usage accounting model, users are charged only for the portion of a node they requested.
Each CPU compute node of Setonix can run multiple jobs in parallel, submitted by a single user or many users, from any project. Sometimes this configuration is called shared access.
A project that has entirely consumed its service units (SUs) for a given quarter of the year will run its jobs in low priority mode, called extra, for that time period. Furthermore, if its service unit consumption for that same quarter hits the 150% usage mark, users of that project will not be able to run any more jobs for that quarter.
Pawsey accounting model bases the GPU charging rate on energy consumption. Such approach, designed for Setonix, has a lot of advantages compared to other models, introducing carbon footprint as a primary driver in determining the allocation of computational workflow on heterogeneous resources.
Pawsey and NCI centres are using slightly different accounting models. Researchers applying for allocations on Setonix and Gadi should refer to Table 2 when calculating their allocation requests.
* calculated based on https://opus.nci.org.au/display/Help/2.2+Job+Cost+Examples for gpuvolta queue |
Criterion 1: Project quality and innovation
Criterion 2: Investigator records
Criterion 3: Computational feasibility
Criterion 4: Benefit and impact
Applications to the NCMAS are via online form at the NCMAS website, https://ncmas.nci.org.au.
There will be no Pawsey Partner top-up allocations starting from 2023 allocation round. Researchers can apply to both NCMAS and Pawsey Partner Scheme subject to the eligibility and conditions of these schemes.