Dr. Stuart Midgley, the Industry Uptake Program director, said the aim of the scheme is to assist companies get into the high-performance computing market to see if it is something they want to invest in.

"It's an expensive market to get into," Midgley said. "We have already had a large amount of interest from government agencies, satellite feeding groups, computational companies in mining industries, and research groups."

The center is aiming to increase the industry uptake of HPC and is seeking applications from organizations interested in high-performance computing and visualization that want to undertake an innovation project or research and development.

Midgley said the center is happy to work with companies in financial services or manufacturing which are already "well served" in computing, but would be interested in data mining and processing projects.

The number of grants to be awarded is likely to be between two and four, with each project receiving a maximum of A$100,000 from iVEC, but Midgley said smaller projects are also welcome. The center anticipates the participants will contribute variable amounts between A$20,000 and A$50,000, which iVEC will match.