NCMAS provides access, based on research and computational merit, for researchers at Australian universities and publicly funded research agencies, to resources at the major national HPC facilities.

NCMAS supports HPC simulations, data processing and AI/ML. Quantum computing is also available via Setonix-Q – a portal for Australian researchers to run hybrid quantum–classical workflows.

The NCMAS 2027 Call for Applications is expected to be highly competitive. Last year:

• About 884 million SU (service units) in total were awarded to applicants at the two
  HPC facilities, NCI and the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre.
• Allocated resources were only ~40% of the total requested resources, with the
  scheme more than 2.5x oversubscribed.
• 110 of 235 applications (~47%) received allocations on one or more of the HPC
  facilities.

The National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme is Australia’s premiere grant scheme for access to high-performance computing (HPC) resources. The two Tier-1 HPC facilities in Australia, the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) and the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, together offer hundreds of millions of hours of computing time to meritorious researchers.