The Fast Track Access Scheme is designed and intended for projects representing high impact and requiring flexible access to supercomputing resources. Submissions to the Fast Track Access Scheme must be recognised as high impactful and endorsed by organisations participating in the scheme (list below). The Fast Track Access Scheme also supports time-critical access including response to natural hazards, public health and national security. 

The National Merit Allocation Scheme (NCMAS) is the Australia's premiere grant scheme for access to supercomputing resources and all research projects requiring continuous access to supercomputing resources should consider submitting their application through NCMAS. The Fast Track Access Scheme is available to Australian researchers to support urgent access to supercomputing resources, but only in cases with clearly justified urgent computing needs. Unsuccessful submission to other schemes, including NCMAS is not considered as a sufficient justification. 

Eligibility

Impact scheme supports highly impactful fundamental and applied research projects requiring flexible or urgent access to resources. Eligible categories of projects include:

• Government Stream: research projects and industry collaborations led by Australian federal or state government,
• University and Research Agencies Stream: research projects and industry collaborations led by Australian higher-education institution, research institute or public-funded research agency,
• Time-Critical Stream: urgent compute access to support research or response to natural hazards, public health and national security.

Other eligibility criteria:

1. The Lead Chief Investigator (Lead CI) must hold a substantive research position at an Australian academic institution, research organisation or government institution undertaking research.
2. Projects submitted to the Fast Track Access Scheme must be endorsed by applicant's host institution (list below).
3. A researcher undertaking a higher degree by research, or holding only an adjunct position, is not eligible to be a Lead CI. Students and PhD students are not eligible to be a Lead CI, but can become project members under the auspices of their supervisor.
4. Other project participants may be staff or students at academic institutions or research organisations, including those located internationally as well as within Australia.
5. The use of Pawsey Project Infrastructure is conditional on complying with relevant laws and export controls, including the Australian Defence Trade Controls Act, United National Security Council (UNSC) sanctions regimes and the Australian autonomous sanctions regimes, and U.S. Export Controls.

Available resources and allocation process

In the initial phase, The Fast Track Access Scheme is available to the Pawsey Partner institution and Western Australia Government departments with total allocation per quarter per institution not exceeding 4M Service Units on Setonix CPU and 2M Service Units on Setonix GPU per quarter per institution. If total or per institution requests are exceeding the scheme capacity or the listed limits, the allocations are decided based on technical assessment (suitability and scalability) with priority given to projects impossible to implement without access to Setonix.

Minimum request size is 250k Service Units per quarter. This is an equivalent of using a single Setonix CPU node (128 cores) or single AMD MI250X GCD throughout the quarter. 

Projects are allocated for 3 months (single quarter).

Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre reserves its right to:

• Reject application if the project is not well suited for Setonix from technical perspective,
• Suggest access through the Preparatory Access Scheme if the project requires code porting, workflow development or benchmarking,  
• Offer a smaller allocation or add the project to the waiting list (the capacity of the scheme is limited in each quarter).

Assessment criteria

The Fast Track Access Scheme operates under the assumption that impact of the research and the need for urgent computing has been assessed and endorsed by the host institution of the applicant. Institutions are expected to manage the prioritisation, as they are the submitters and there is a limited amount of resources per organisation in each quarter. Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre undertakes an internal review limited only to eligibility check and technical assessment. The following technical criteria are used:  

Suitability (50%)

• Method of parallelisation, including job packing, OpenMP, MPI and data/workflow parallelism
• Planned footprint of workflow, including wall times, memory, storage, and transfers

Scalability (50%)

• Planned scale of workflow in terms of size and number of jobs

Application form and process

The Fast Track Access Scheme operates under the assumption that impact of the research and the need for urgent computing has been assessed and endorsed by the host institution of the applicant. Please see the list of eligible institutions and contact details below. 

Applications for the Fast Track Access Scheme must be submitted online via the application portal. The call is open all year round with the following cutoff dates: 

To ensure Pawsey has the information needed to properly assess a proposal, a researcher should ensure that they:

• meet the criteria of the call to which they are applying,
• read the information about the scheme carefully and aim to address all points of consideration,
• read comments to all items of the application form and aim to address them accordingly, 
• provide clear and complete information.

More specifically, the application form requires the following information:

Participating institutions