High performance computing is stimulating collaborative research across state - and country - borders.

The Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) has announced details of its next generation supercomputer, which according to executive director John O'Callaghan, has a chance to be one of the top 30 in the world. The supercomputer will provide a computing environment for more than 600 researchers across areas such as the environment, bioinformatics, astronomy, chemistry and physics.

A new service has been established to give researchers and biotechnology companies access to drug discovery and bioinformatics tools.

Small companies within Australia's growing life sciences industry are starting to compute like the big boys, thanks to a growing investment in the sector by companies keen to feed its hunger for high-performance computing (HPC) systems.

Data-intensive research fields such as physics and life science will soon benefit from grid computing technology, a new method for analysing massive amounts of data demonstrated in Australia for the first time at the recent ICCS 2003 (International Conference on Computational Science) in Melbourne.