NCI welcomes significant investment in Australia’s High-Performance Computing research capability

The Board of Australia’s National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), based at The Australian National University (ANU), has welcomed the Australian Government’s announcement that it will invest $70 million to replace Australia’s highest performance research supercomputer, Raijin, which is rapidly nearing the end of its service life. The funding, through the Department of Education and Training, will be provided as $69.2 million in 2017-18 and $800,000 in 2018-19.

Within the university sector, NCI provides the essential high-performance computing and data foundation for more than 200 Australian Research Council (ARC) and National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Projects, Centres of Excellence, Industry Hubs, and Fellowships. Funding for these projects from the ARC and NHMRC totals around $60 million per annum, or approximately $250 million over the projects’ lifetimes. The maintenance of merit-based access for Australian researchers to the NCI is also supported through an ARC Linkage Infrastructure Equipment and Facilities grant.

NCI, Australia’s national high-end research computing service, is in the vanguard of international advanced computing, delivering solutions that encompass computationally intensive modelling and simulation and address the needs of big data—a requirement recognised in the Australian Government’s 2016 National Research Infrastructure Roadmap.

It operates through a partnership of The Australian National University, CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, Geoscience Australia, research-intensive universities and consortia supported by the ARC, and medical research institutes. This partnership, together with ongoing support from the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), sustains the annual $18 million recurrent cost of operations.

Media issued by NCI.