NYSF students discover the Power of Supercomputing with NCI and ACCESS-NRI!

Last January, ACCESS-NRI participated with NCI in the National Youth Science Forum (NYSF), welcoming 20 enthusiastic students to explore Gadi’s cutting-edge technology and the importance ACCESS-NRI’s cutting-edge climate modelling work.

On top of a superb tour through the Gadi supercomputer by NCI staff, Chris Bull (ACCESS-NRI Ocean Model Team Lead) gave a presentation explaining what ACCESS-NRI is, what we do and the impact we enable to address critical challenges like climate change. He emphasized how our modelling relies on NCI’s computational and data resources, providing the High Performance Computational (HPC) power required to run the data-intensive ACCESS models.

NYSF students also got an exciting peek into careers in science and technology. Lachlan Whyborn and Chris Bull from ACCESS-NRI presented on their interesting career paths in science and research software engineering. This included Chris’ own participation in NYSF in 2007 followed by and his career path as an ocean modeller (including a trip to Antarctica!).

Lachlan showed a completely different path from the space research to land surface modelling, passing through extragalactic astrophysics, a PhD on large scale simulations of hypersonic geometries, how he helped to build the software simulation of the Apollo Capsule and finally ended working on land surface modelling at ACCESS-NRI.

A big thank you to the NYSF students for their interesting questions and enthusiasm and to NCI’s staff for collaborating with us on this exciting visit.