Australian HPC-AI Talent Program

PhD scholarships and computing resources to accelerate AI-enabled research success for our next generation 

Program Information

HPC-AI has now become a bundled term due to the rapid progress of deep learning architectures, which are empowered by running AI applications at scale on supercomputing infrastructures. NCI empowers a wide range of research that needs computing, storage, and cloud resources through various merit-based allocation schemes.  However, most PhD students are not eligible as independent lead CI to apply for the national scheme. To address the growing demand for computing and storage resources of the HPC-AI application, as well as supporting our next generation of researchers, NCI offers 100KSU with appropriate storage, and AUD $10,000 per year towards eligible PhD project costs to support PhD programs through the NCI Australia HPC-AI Talent Program.

We are looking forward to supporting AI applications on diverse scientific problems such as solving differential equations, accelerating molecular dynamics, predicting 3-dimensional protein structures, controlling nuclear fusion, or weather forecasting with higher resolution and accuracy. Some HPC-AI applications encounter a range of workflow bottlenecks. The performance can be limited by compute bound, I/O bound, memory bound, or a combination of the above, pushing the need for HPCD into the exascale range. The unprecedented representational ability of deep neural network structures can only be brought to bear on the most complex and urgent global problems by model training with ultra-large datasets on heterogeneous exascale HPCD architectures. Hence we would like to identify those hurdles and provide support to address them for the next generation of young researchers. 

Eligibility

We aim to support 10 PhD students in 2023. The general rule is that the fund and compute resources are to be used within the period of PhD study.

• Current PhD students, including to be the first year PhD for the year of application.
• The final year of PhD students is subject to the finishing timeline of the PhD.
• Australian and New Zealand applicants only

Inquiry

Should you have any questions, please send emails to training.nci@anu.edu.au.

Application Process

Eligible candidates need to go through the application process for the scholarship program. The selection is merit-based and the judging committee makes the decision independently.

Application Submission

Please provide your resume (2 pages maximum), two reference letters and your application (2 pages maximum) to training.nci@anu.edu.au as PDF attachments. Please use the Application Template file below.

studentship_application_NAME_ORG.docx

Program stages

For successful scholarship recipients, program reviews are conducted each quarter for the duration of the program and a final report is required at the end of the program. 

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