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The challenge

Understanding how supercomputers can solve research questions computationally

PAWSEY Supercomputing centre enables scalable computational approaches that provide insights into the biggest scientific questions, making a major contribution to scientific knowledge and improving Australia's capabilities.

Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth, Western Australia. Credit: Pawsey Supercomputing Centre

Our response

Enabling word class research

The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is an enabler for world class research. It helps researchers to understand how supercomputers can solve research questions computationally. It also helps researchers interpret complex data, and demonstrates how to adopt scalable computational approaches to advance the biggest scientific questions. Pawsey's predominantly competitive merit-based access to computing time prioritises the most beneficial and impactful research activities. In the past year alone, Pawsey supported over 1 500 researchers, 194 projects, and upskilled over 600 Australians in high performance computing and data activities.

These activities have accelerated science to deliver fast and efficient outputs; facilitated research not possible without supercomputing; promoted expertise in data science; forged international relationships in supercomputing and large scale data processing and analysis; and kept and attracted world class scientific research in Australia.

The results

Making big things happen

There many aspects of the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre that generate economic value to Australia.

  • The type of research undertaken using supercomputing is typically game changing — insights are more accurate, inevitably more timely, and many of the ideas that are tested could not otherwise be explored.
  • Extremely large amounts of information can be stored at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre and accessed in real time, providing even greater research potential for current and future generations.
  • The cost of research to users of the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre is substantially reduced, meaning R&D investments go further, and the process of research is more efficient and effective — identifying research endeavours with clear potential to generate value to Australia, and sharing learnings in a timely way to redirect other endeavours to more productive uses.

Three case studies have been presented to show the varied use of the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre to explore the biggest scientific questions, and to highlight the various ways that economic value to Australia is created in just a small sample of the 194 projects facilitated by the Centre. The benefits and impacts aligned to each can be viewed in the link below.

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