Documenting the monumental discoveries of researchers, and the role Pawsey plays in supporting their breakthroughs.
High Performance Computing, or HPC, allows researchers to tackle incredibly complex questions.
This series is all about finding out the real-world impact that comes from using this large-scale computing.
We talk to researchers and scientists across Australia on how they have used HPC to discover their breakthroughs.
We want to showcase the hearts and minds behind the technology.
Listen to our episodes
Ep 2: Moon Craters and Mars Meteorites
With Artemis II back on Earth, the world is abuzz about the Moon. In this episode we sat down with Professor Gretchen Benedix, Associate Deputy Vice-Chancellor of Research at Curtin University.
Gretchen is an astro-geologist who studies craters. Her studies at university started in psychology, but one elective unit changed all that.
Gretchen has moved from the US, to the UK, eventually finding her way to Australia, where she has worked on projects like the Desert Fireball Network, which watches the sky and lets the team know when a new asteroid has landed on Earth.
She’s gone on expeditions to Antarctica to pick up meteorites, can analyse rocks that made the journey from Mars all the way to Earth, and even has an asteroid named after her.
Counting craters helps astro-geologists to understand the surface ages of planets. Older maps of craters on planets were painstakingly counted by hand. For Mars, it took over six years to identify 385,000 craters that were 1 kilometre wide.
As technology has improved, so has that ability to count. Using Pawsey’s supercomputer, Gretchen’s team analysed vast datasets of high-resolution images from Mars missions. Through machine learning, they automated crater detection, identifying more than 90 million impact craters in just 24 hours – a task that would have taken years manually.
This work informed the world’s largest Mars crater database, enabling researchers to determine the age of surface features with unprecedented accuracy. It also supported major discoveries, including tracing the origin of the ‘Black Beauty’ meteorite back to a specific crater on Mars.
Ep 1: Secrets and Tsunamis of the Indian Ocean with Charitha Pattiaratchi
Professor Charitha Pattiaratchi is an Oceanographer at the University of Western Australia.
For over 25 years, Chari has been instrumental in showcasing the power behind the waters that surround us, including discoveries in tsunami impacts and dense shelf water transport.
Essentially oceanography studies the ocean, but there’s so much more to it, which Chari explains later.
Chari received the People’s Choice Award at the Premier’s Scientist of the Year for 2025 for his contributions to Australian oceanography.
His work also helped discover locations of debris from the missing MH370 flight back in 2014, which we talk about as well.
Using oceanic drift modelling with Pawsey’s supercomputer, Chari was able to simulate two years’ worth of moving water. This gave plane debris locations along Madagascar, Mozambique and Tanzania.
Chari sees what he does as if it’s a jigsaw puzzle, taking each piece – like supercomputing, fieldwork and satellite imagery – and putting it together to see the whole picture. Chari has documented a lot of what makes our waters different from the rest of the world.
He was one of the first users of iVEC, which was what Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre was called until 2014.
His love for the ocean has taken him from his home in Sri Lanka to the United Kingdom, and now in Australia, studying the Indian Ocean and why it vastly differs from other oceans.
Podcast trailer
Subscribe to the podcast
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
HPC Hearts & Minds is available on podcast apps, as well as on our YouTube page.
What is Pawsey?
The Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre is Australia’s premier high-performance computing facility for science located in Perth, Western Australia.
Pawsey is driving scientific breakthroughs through exascale-ready compute, data infrastructure, and expertise that support nationally significant research and international collaboration.
Home to Setonix, one of the most powerful and energy-efficient research supercomputers in the Southern Hemisphere, Pawsey also advances quantum–classical integration through its Supercomputing Quantum Innovation Hub.
Pawsey is a nationally funded NCRIS facility, supported by the Western Australian Government, and a joint venture between CSIRO and leading Western Australian universities.