Two of Australia’s high performance computing (HPC) heavyweights have joined forces to offer additional computation and data resources for the national and international fight against the coronavirus pandemic.
The COVID-19 Special Call from the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre and the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) is intended to identify projects that will benefit from additional help acquiring, processing, analysing, storing and sharing data related to research on the outbreak.
The grants come even as NCI and Pawsey brace for disruptions from the virus themselves.
On offer are free HPC resources up to 20 MSU (million service units) and 0.5 PB on the NCI’s new Gadi supercomputer (the most powerful in Australia) for use during the remainder of 2020 and for the first six months of 2021.
Pawsey is offering up its Cloud Service, which doesn’t officially launch until 1 April, which has been re-prioritised for coronavirus research with allocations of up to 500 cores, with up to 100 TB storage available for use through to 2021.
Cloud resources may also be allocated on NCI’s cloud systems “where appropriate and available”.
Support services like code optimisation, workflow debugging, visualisation expertise and data management advice will also be provided by dedicated support staff from both institutions as appropriate.
Possible research applications eligible for the grants could include (but are not limited to):
- Processing and analysing gene sequences
- Mathematical modelling of the vector stages predicting transmission and containment
- Computational predictions of protein structures associated with COVID-19 and associated biomolecular modelling
- Modelling economics of the COVID-19 global pandemic
- Population mapping and demographics
- Global biosecurity
- Epidemiological modelling
Applications for grants are open until 8 April at 5pm AEDT, with allocations set to be announced on 17 April.
More information on the grants can be found here [pdf].
