How Australia’s supercomputers crunched the numbers to guide our bushfire and pandemic response

As 2020 began, Australia was stunned by the worst bushfires on record. Six months later we are weathering the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the globe.

This year, perhaps more than ever before, decision-makers, emergency services, health providers and threatened communities have needed fast, reliable information to understand what’s happening. And beyond that, they have needed high-powered modelling to get a sense of what is yet to come.

That’s where supercomputers come in. Australia’s high-performance research computing infrastructure is led by two centres: the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI Australia) in Canberra and the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth.

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