National HPCs

How do national HPCs differ from institutional systems?

National HPC systems, like NCI’s Gadi and Pawsey’s Setonix, are largescale facilities funded by the federal government to support Australia’s research community. National HPCs are not administered by USyd and offer greater scale by providing thousands more CPU and GPU nodes suited to extremely large workloads.  

NCI Gadi HPC

NCI’s Gadi HPC is designed for data-intensive, high-performance computing (HPC) workloads that demand large-scale parallel processing, high memory capacity, and fast I/O. It is well-suited to a wide range of research domains including climate science, computational chemistry, genomics, and artificial intelligence. Gadi’s architecture supports both CPU and GPU computing across a mix of standard and high-memory nodes, making it an ideal platform for large simulations, modelling, and machine learning at scale.

Pawsey Setonix HPC

Pawsey’s Setonix HPC is purpose-built for compute-intensive and data-intensive research, supporting complex simulations, large-scale modelling, and machine learning across disciplines including astronomy, geoscience, life sciences, and AI. Built on the HPE Cray EX architecture, Setonix offers a hybrid CPU-GPU platform with high memory bandwidth and energy efficiency, making it well suited to workflows requiring both large parallel jobs and advanced accelerator capabilities. Researchers benefit from its integration with national data infrastructure and support for massive datasets such as those from the Square Kilometre Array.

How do I access these systems?

See information on the Sydney Scheme.

How do I use these systems?

NCI Gadi

For Gadi user documentation and support, refer to:

• NCI Gadi technical guide for USyd users

• NCI Gadi training for USyd users

• NCI Gadi user guide

• NCI training calendar

• NCI self-directed training platform

Pawsey Setonix

For Setonix user documentation and support, refer to:

• Pawsey Setonix user guide

• Pawsey training page