The Preparatory Access Scheme is designed and intended for researchers who need to:

• port and benchmark their codes and workflows before applying to one of the merit allocation schemes,
• generate scalability data to be included in the merit allocation schemes proposals. 

Preparatory Access projects are allocated with a fixed allocation of 100k Service Units for 3 months.

Eligibility

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. 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.
3. Other project participants may be staff or students at academic institutions or research organisations, including those located internationally as well as within Australia.
4. 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.

Assessment criteria

Applications to Preparatory Access Scheme are assessed against the technical criteria only.

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

Applications for the Preparatory Access Scheme must be submitted online via the application portal. The call is open all year round. Proposals undergo a technical review by Pawsey experts within two weeks of submission.

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: