Jane Hume (Victoria, Liberal Party, Minister for Superannuation, Financial Services and the Digital Economy) Share this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Bragg a lot for this question. In fact, I'm extraordinarily grateful for this question because only just this morning I had the pleasure of visiting the National Computational Infrastructure Facility at the ANU. I met somebody called Gadi—or something called Gadi. Gadi is the most powerful supercomputer in the Southern Hemisphere. It is in fact the 27th most powerful supercomputer in the world. The Morrison government is very proud to have supported this remarkable technology, with $70 million allocated in 2019 to get this supercomputer up and running, supporting jobs in the Australian research and technology industry. It's right here in Canberra on the ANU campus.

I met with Associate Director Alan Higgins, Professor Sean Smith and Vice-Chancellor Brian Schmidt, who told me it has already been put to work by a large community of researchers from the likes of the CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, Geoscience Australia and, of course, the ANU itself. You may not know this but Gadi actually means 'to search for' in the language of the Ngunawal people and that's exactly what Gadi does. It allows researchers to process extraordinary amounts of data in search of answers to some of our most challenging questions. For example, it's been leveraged to build a complex genomic data set for studies into cancer, into diabetes, into lupus and into heart disease. In fact, it's given ANU astronomers a better understanding how stars form. A team of chemists have been incorporating the supercomputer into its search for a COVID-19 treatment. Both CSIRO and Geoscience Australia will use the supercomputer to improve their own systems aimed at predicting extreme weather patterns including fires, earthquakes, tsunami and cyclones.