For researchers in Australia, and for people with no university email.
National supercomputers, campus clusters, cloud credits, and a few honest paid options. Written without the jargon, and with a source on every fact that could go stale.
Start with the map. The chooser below makes it personal.
01
Nectar is a research cloud reached from Australian universities with the login you already have, the Australian Access Federation. Many campuses also run their own cluster. If you have no .edu.au address, Kaggle includes about 30 GPU hours a week, and Hugging Face ZeroGPU will run a short demo of someone else’s model.
02
Students and university researchers can apply for Google Cloud and AWS research credits. Independent researchers without a .edu.au address should look at Google TPU Research Cloud. Microsoft Founders Hub and NVIDIA Inception are for startups, so read the company rules before you spend an afternoon on the form.
03
Gadi at NCI and Setonix at Pawsey are the national machines, usually through NCMAS or a startup scheme when one is open. Companies look at CSIRO Kick-Start, or at paid access. If you need a GPU tonight and nobody has approved you, rent an hour from RunPod or Vast.ai and turn it off when you stop.
Three choices. Then a short plan.
Pick the work, the timing, and where you are based. Every combination gives three next steps: what to open today, what is worth an application, and a backup that does not depend on a committee.
Choose one option in each row. The plan appears here.
Only rounds with a published day.
The committee meets to set 2027 allocations on NCI Gadi and Pawsey Setonix. This is not a public event.
NCMAS publishes 2027 computing allocations for NCI Gadi and Pawsey Setonix.
NCMAS publishes 2027 allocations. Pawsey Setonix is one of the two machines in that call.
NCMAS publishes 2027 allocations. NCI Gadi is one of the two machines in that call.
Two reminders, not a drip campaign.
A short email when a dated round is about to close or when results are published. No newsletter about other people’s products.