Requesting Access to Pawsey Supercomputers

Owned by Cristian Di Pietrantonio
Last updated: Jul 07, 2023 by Alexis Espinosa
2 min read

The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is supported by $160 million funding as part of the Australian Government’s measures to support national research infrastructure under the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and related programs through the Department of Education. Australia's National Innovation Roadmap explicitly states that "access focuses on the merit of the research to be undertaken as the primary determinant for access".

There are two main access mechanisms, driven by the Access Principles of the National Innovation Roadmap:

  • Merit: The bulk of supercomputer access at Pawsey is through competitive merit.
  • National Interest: At Pawsey, some infrastructure is reserved for the precursor telescopes of the Square Kilometre Array, ASKAP and MWA.

Proposals for competitive merit projects may be submitted through one of a number of schemes that Pawsey operates or participates in. Through these merit allocation schemes, Pawsey strives to:

  • Maximise the research impact of Pawsey Supercomputers
  • Promote scientific advantage in priority domains, such as radio astronomy and geosciences
  • Provide leading-edge, supercomputing resources for researchers in Pawsey Partner institutions
  • Enable wider adoption of and benefit from supercomputing across Australia

Main general steps

The process for gaining access to Pawsey Supercomputers is:

  1. Review eligibility criteria for the different Allocation Schemes available to Pawsey (see Allocation Schemes and Eligibility)
  2. Lead Chief Investigator (Lead CI) registers on the allocation portal for an appropriate Allocation Scheme (information in the same link as above)
  3. Lead CI completes and submits the application for allocation (see Completing an Application for Allocation)
  4. Application is assessed (information in the same link as above)
  5. Lead CI is informed about the results of their application (see Allocation Results and Administration)

After the assessment, the Lead CI is notified of the allocation result. If the allocation has been successful, then accounts for their team are created by Pawsey administrators and access granted.

Pawsey reserves the right to move projects to the most appropriate resource. Examples include moving projects from GPU access to CPU-only access, or vice versa, and moving projects that do not need a high-speed interconnect among clusters.

It is important that the Lead CI and the members of their project read the documentation to understand their allocation, project administration and using supercomputers.

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