In its response to the 2016 National Research Infrastructure Roadmap the Australian Government commits to investments worth in total almost $2.2 billion to 2028-29.
The Research Infrastructure Investment Plan commits $2.2 billion across nine research areas, with investments ranging from expanding the operations of the RV Investigator by an additional 120 days a year, through to building CubeSats.
They include:
$1.9 billion in new funding for the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), with $1.5 billion allocated for equipment and capabilities, and a further $400 million towards operating funding, and the scoping of potentially new capabilities;
$140 million to upgrade Australia's high performance computational capabilities , with $70 million in new funding for the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre to replace the centre's flagship supercomputers Magnus and Galaxy, and $70 million for National Computational Infrastructure at the Australian National University (allocated in 2017-18); and
$119 million for Australia's strategic partnership with the European Southern Observatory (ESO).
The investment is funding infrastructure across the nine focus areas proposed in the 2016 Roadmap, with most of the funding - $911 million - supporting Digital data & eResearch platforms. This includes funding of HPC capabilities and upgrades to virtual laboratories, research cloud storage and data security.
Support of other focus areas includes:
Platforms for Humanities, Arts and Social Science (HASS)- $112 million
The $2.2 billion in infrastructure funding is part of a Research Infrastructure Investment Plan that builds on over $2.3 billion in funding announced in 2015:
$1.5 billion over 10 years, indexed, for operational costs of facilities under the NCRIS;
$520 million towards the operation of the Australian Synchroton; and
$294 million for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
