National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)

NCI is Australia’s largest research supercomputing facility, giving researchers the highest available performance for their compute and data intensive workloads. NCI’s Gadi supercomputer caters to the largest research organisations, while simultaneously supporting the leading work of individual research groups and projects. NCI supports research community requirements for both high performance computing (HPC) and high throughput computing (HTC) by providing access to Cloud and Gadi services.

NCI increases the value and reach of research-ready datasets by providing high quality and high performance data-intensive services. NCI’s data services allow users, data portals and external science cloud environments to access, interact with and extract value from our data collections. Our approach to data services is focused on working with data as a living and connected resource, developing software, and providing portals and network protocols for accessing data.

As a trusted national data repository, NCI optimises some of the largest and most significant datasets requiring our high-performance capabilities. NCI curates and optimises nationally and internationally significant reference datasets (including CMIP5 and CMIP6, ERA5, Landsat, Himawari and more), making them suitable for data-intensive science as well as publication for broader access. These data collections are used by scientists, government agencies and industry to undertake research which underpins many important scientific advancements and decision-making.

Virtual Research Environments (VREs) bring together a community of researchers across multiple organisations to enhance collaboration on national and international science priorities. Virtual research environments are developed through coordinated engagement with research communities to maximise the use of NCI’s compute and data infrastructure. NCI’s national leadership in computational workflows on HPC systems and high-performance petascale reference data provides the only research platform in Australia capable of supporting intensive data analysis and simulation. . NCI’s Cloud facilitates flexible approaches to HPC and HTC research collaboration to support the needs of the diverse Australian science community.

The high-performance data storage systems at NCI consist of multiple powerful filesystems with some of the highest performance in the country. Tightly integrated with a collocated supercomputer across a dedicated high-speed network, NCI’s more than 100 petabytes of data storage brings high-performance data to the fore and makes groundbreaking big data research possible.

NCI’s scientific visualisations are a valuable tool that enables researchers to gain deeper insights into complex datasets and easily communicate their scientific results. NCI has a team of specialist visualisation programmers (the VizLab) that generate images, videos, and virtual reality experiences that can extend the discovery process for our scientists, and communicate high-impact results more broadly.

NCI performs code and data optimisation to unlock the highest resolution science and increased scientific productivity from highly used research software. NCI is focused on improving the productivity of our most important HPC and data-intensive applications. By ensuring that the code harnesses all of the computational capability and data available to it, we can help address our most challenging scientific problems.