AusSRC Expressions of Interest Now Open
AusSRC invites the Australian SKA community to submit expressions of interest (EoIs) for AusSRC support.
EoIs will open 15 December 2024 and close 31 January 2025.
EoI Overview
The required format for the EoI will be a word document or PDF, no longer than 2 pages including figures and references, with the following general sections:
- Proposal team and commitment
- Problem statement
- Brief project description
- Existing resources or projects (e.g. compute facility, codebase)
- Any other relevant background information or links
A template has been provided that we recommend you use, by copying the Overleaf template to your own project, or downloading the zip file to edit your own copy (see PDF for reference). To submit an EoI, email [email protected] with your document by 31 January. Any questions you have about the process may also be directed to this address.
Proposal Topics
Proposals and ideas should relate to specific science projects and how AusSRC can help to support or facilitate that science.
These may touch on various areas within the software development or scientific support domains. For example:
- Workflow / pipeline development (adapting tools)
e.g. “I have some scripts that carry out some essential steps on our project’s data, but I want to integrate it into
something more streamlined and automated that operates seamlessly within our workflow that is run on this HPC facility.”
e.g. “I’d like our pipeline to be wrapped up into a web service that anyone in our team can log into and interact with.” - Software development (creating or enhancing tools)
e.g. “I’m not sure what data structure or algorithm to use to solve this problem!”
e.g. “Our pipeline takes too long to run! We need to adapt it to GPUs!” - Science support (enabling science and wielding tools)
e.g. “I want to use this tool, but I’m not sure how it works, or which parameters to use!”
e.g. “I’m not sure how to approach this problem, or what tools or algorithms may be useful.”
Additional Considerations
Some projects may wish to consider use of AusSRC computing infrastructure, such as our current cloud-computing platforms, and any future AusSRC academic or commercial computing resources. Additionally, proposals may wish to utilise existing projects on existing facilities, and should indicate the nature of these.
This particular round of proposals will be focussed on Australian SKA precursor science (e.g. leveraging ASKAP or MWA data), but also invites contributions for projects related to the SKA and its key science goals. This includes science projects making use of the MeerKAT telescope, in collaboration with the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA), and projects making use of multi-wavelength data, in collaboration with Data Central.
Proposals should align with the scope of AusSRC responsibilities, and where possible, address challenges with technologies, computation, data storage and movement, post-processing, or data analysis and visualisation. We encourage you to consider any existing or potential industry collaborations, or translation projects applying your science or techniques in other domains.
Following the EoI, selected projects will be invited to consult with AusSRC, particularly its software development and support science teams, to evaluate the scope and estimate the resources required for your proposal. Proposers will work with AusSRC to break up their project into smaller, achievable development or support goals within an overall roadmap, using an Agile framework. This will then form the basis of the resources and methodology included in a formal proposal that teams will be invited to submit to AusSRC, following this consultation period. Proposals will be then be assessed by a time allocation committee, based on scientific and technical merits, resources required, and overall feasibility.
For teams seeking AusSRC support for more than one proposal under the same project, we request that they submit separate EoIs, unless there is significant overlap between those proposals, building on the same groundwork. We encourage proposers to contact us at [email protected] if there is any uncertainty about your proposals.
Next Steps
Awarded proposals will be granted a fixed-term project estimated to match development or support work involved.
At the end of this period, software development projects will be handed over to the AusSRC operations team, to deploy the workflow, pipeline, or service on the selected infrastructure.
Projects requiring further development or support, including anything that could not be achieved within this fixed-term period, will be invited to resubmit their proposals within a subsequent round.
