Your local institution

If you are part of a university or research institution: check with your local institution first about whether they have an HPC system, or access to one.


National HPC and cloud systems

If you are an Australian researcher, you may be eligible to use some national HPC and cloud systems. 

  • You usually need to apply for an "allocation" of time and space on the HPC/cloud. This is not guaranteed but is granted to researchers if they meet certain criteria.

  • Some allocation schemes are open to any researcher in Australia who is part of the AAF (Australian Access Federation). Several research organisations subscribe to this - check if your organisation is listed.

  • The Australian BioCommons has partnered with various Australian organisations that provide access to HPC and cloud computing: a list of these organisations and infrastructures can be found here. Contact your institution first as they may already have access to some of these systems. 


Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS)

This Australian BioCommons program provides computational resources, specialist expertise, and a shared repository of tools and software, tailored to support life science researchers across three areas:

  • Generation of valuable reference data assets eg. reference genome assemblies

  • Data analysis at production scale using established computational workflow approaches 

  • Acceleration of bioinformatics software development, installation, optimisation, testing and/or benchmarking.


Commercial systems

If you are not part of an organisation, or prefer another option, there are also some commercial providers for cloud computing. For these, you would set up some “instances”, which are the computers, connect via your computer, and run your analyses. Always be careful to stop any instances when finished (even if your analysis is no longer running) so that you don’t keep being charged.