The latest NCMAS grant scheme has demonstrated the demand for facilities that can help with the future challenges of the world. With 2025 almost over, we look forward to what's to come next year.
Powering Discovery, Sharing Success, and Building Community
Dear Name,
As we close out an extraordinary year marking Pawsey's 25th anniversary of enabling discovery, this December we bring you highlights from across the nation and beyond – showcasing how Pawsey is supporting world-class research and training the next generation of computational scientists.
Unprecedented demand for Australian HPC through the NCMAS 2026 allocation round evidenced the critical importance of national supercomputing infrastructure for R&D. Researchers requested 2.2 billion compute hours across Setonix and National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)'s Gadi – nearly triple available capacity. This response underscores both our success in empowering research and the need for expanded sovereign computing capabilities.
The WA Climate Science Initiative (CSI) celebrated key achievements and shared an update at Murdoch University, with Pawsey’s infrastructure featured as a critical part of modelling our future climate. Over three years, the project has:
used 150 million service units on Setonix to downscale information from six global climate models across three human-driven COâ‚‚ emissions scenarios, producing projections out to 2100.
informed analyses of rainfall changes in WA’s South-West, and supporting work on urban heat island modelling and fire-risk prediction.
We also welcomed the next generation of researchers, with 12 summer interns and two mentors beginning their journey into our 2025-26 Summer Internship, with a week-long training at our facilities. In a special 25th anniversary sundowner, past intern alumni returned to share insights with new recruits, creating connections across generations of computational scientists.
On the global stage at SC25 in St. Louis, the largest international supercomputing conference, the rank of the systems worldwide were release, crowned El Capitan – a supercomputer with similar architecture as Setonix – at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in the United States the #1 supercomputer on the Top500 list.
Setonix was ranked #66 worldwide and #30 on the Green500 for energy efficiency after its debut in 2020 as the world 4th greenest and 15th most powerful one, Australia was well represented overall, with CSIRO's Virga (#121), NCI's Gadi (#179) and Spartan (#332) joining Setonix on the global list. Team Pawsey's Chris Schlipalius, Deva Kumar Deeptimahanti, and Edric Matwiejew represented Australian excellence, with Edric discussing quantum computing futures and Chris serving on the technical committee.
Our community was also recognised through the Premier's Science Awards, with long-standing Pawsey users Professor Jacqueline Batley (UWA) awarded Scientist of the Year and Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi (UWA) receiving the People's Choice Award. Meanwhile, CEO Mark Stickells brought supercomputing's daily impact to broader audiences through The Group of Eight's Debate@Go8 podcast.
Building connections across borders, the NCRIS Communications Network Forum in Melbourne united Australia's research infrastructure community. Chaired by Pawsey's Communication Manager Karina Nunez, the event provided opportunities to share learnings and plan collaborative strategies. Our Manager Partner Engagement Aditi Subramanya explored Finnish approaches to connecting research communities at CSC – IT Center for Science. Setonix also welcomed diverse visitors, from AMD executives to TAFE students – reflecting our commitment to engagement across all levels.
Looking ahead, the Pawsey newsletter will evolve in coming months as we join forces with NCI to create a unified national HPC newsletter – combining the best from both centres. We'll keep you informed about the transition, and If you feel there's something that would be a great addition to this new kind of newsletter, feel free to reach out.
As we celebrate 25 years of discovery and look toward 2026, we thank you for being part of our journey.
Record demand highlights Australia’s growing need for supercomputing power
NCMAS is a national meritorious grant scheme for access to high-performance computing (HPC) resources.
The two Tier-1 HPC facilities in Australia – Pawsey's Setonix and NCI's Gadi – together offer hundreds of millions of hours of computing time to researchers.
This year’s demand highlights the growing need for high-performance computing (HPC) in driving innovative science across Australia. This year, a total of 245 applications were received for NCMAS among both supercomputing centres.
The collective demand of more than 2.2 billion compute hours, exceeded the annual NCMAS compute share on Gadi and Setonix by nearly 3 times, highlighting NCMAS’s critical role in national research.
Demand for each facility exceeds 1 billion compute hours for the first time.
The ARDC Nectar Research Cloud is Australia’s national cloud research computing service, and the Western Australia node is hosted at Pawsey.
On Nectar, you and your team can use scalable computational resources, run software, host research platforms and applications, and store and access data remotely and at scale.
Whether it’s data analysis, simulation, or other research computing work, Nectar can help you.
Pawsey Summer Internships: Hands-On Learning at the Frontier of Science
This year’s program brings together a diverse set of projects, each led by an experienced project lead, spanning fields from quantum computing and artificial intelligence to astronomy, materials science, and health research.
For the interns, it’s an opportunity to work on projects that not only push scientific boundaries but also give them hands-on access to the computational resources that they would rarely encounter as students. The final showcase provides the interns with an opportunity to share their findings.
Together with NVIDIA and OpenACC organisation, NCI Australia, Monash University, Australian BioCommons, Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre and SHARON.AI, in mid-February will be a hands-on, multi-day hackathon.
This week is designed to help computational scientists and researchers accelerate and optimise their applications on a variety of data centre architectures, including CPUs and GPUs.
This event is ideal for scientists, researchers and developers working in Australian research institutions, NCRIS facilities, national science agencies and research centres who can bring a team to work on their computational science challenge.
Participants will leave with their scientific applications accelerated and/or optimised on high-performance computers, or with a clear roadmap of how to leverage these resources.
Big news is on the horizon! Pawsey and NCI are joining forces to bring you a new joint newsletter.
This will be your go-to source for the latest stories, research highlights, and training opportunities from Australia's national supercomputing facilities.
This means there will soon be one unified newsletter, combining the best updates from both centres in a single, streamlined publication.
We'll be sharing more details as we get closer to it, so keep an eye out here and on our social channels on how to receive the latest in HPC, data, and digital research.
More chances to connect with the Pawsey team and discover HPC
AMD shares news about the world’s first fully open-source nanopore sequencing basecalling
At the beginning of the year, Slorado was showcased by Hasindu Gamaarachchi from UNSW Sydney and Bonson Wong from the Garvan Institute of Medical Research team.
This open-source software allows researchers to process nanopore sequencing data on any mainstream GPU hardware.
Initially only available on NVIDIA GPUs, they were able to create a version (Slorado) that worked with AMD GPUs – demonstrating this with Pawsey’s Setonix AMD GPUs. To demonstrate its potential, Setonix "achieved total basecalling times of 2.3 hours for the FAST model" – a dramatic increase in speed compared to traditional workflows.
AMD shared a story about this work recently, going into detail the speed in which a full human genome dataset could now be decoded.
As part of our 25 years of Pawsey, our Annual Report included interviews with people across the timeline who have contributed to our story.
Amanda Bernard, one of Australia’s most highly awarded computational scientists, has worked closely with Pawsey in several roles and is a strategic advisor to the board. In this video, she discusses the PaCER scheme and the importance of investing in expertise.
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