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Monash University Hosts NVIDIA and OpenACC AI for Science Hackathon

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Australian Researchers Develop AI Prototypes in Multi-Day Hackathon

Researchers from multiple Australian and international institutions participated in a multi-day AI hackathon at Monash University, developing prototype systems for scientific challenges in fields including medicine and agriculture. The event was organized in partnership with NVIDIA and OpenACC.

Event Overview

The NVIDIA and OpenACC AI for Science Australian Hackathon was held at Monash University.

The event format involved intensive team sprints where selected researchers worked to build functional prototypes from early-stage concepts over several days.

Participants were chosen through a competitive application process and were paired with mentors from NVIDIA, Monash University, Australian BioCommons, and the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) Australia.

Participating Institutions and Partners

Researchers attended from the following institutions:

  • Monash University
  • Hudson Institute of Medical Research
  • University of New South Wales (Sydney)
  • Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (Western Australia)
  • ACCESS NRI
  • National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
  • La Trobe University

Supporting partners for the event included NCI Australia, Pawsey, Australian BioCommons, and Sharon AI. Hariharan Suresh, NVIDIA Senior Cloud AI and Gen AI Technologist APAC, addressed attendees.

Project Examples

Teams worked on a variety of projects, with several cited across sources:

  • Medical Research: One project focused on identifying therapeutic targets in paediatric brain cancer.
  • Agricultural Analysis: A project addressing agricultural planning in Western Australia's southwest cropping region built a system to analyze satellite data across more than 267,000 individual farm paddocks annually. The system was redesigned to process data faster and handle larger volumes, with the goal of improving crop identification and yield prediction accuracy. The team also created a user interface for farmers and local decision-makers to access the results.
  • Model Acceleration: Another team demonstrated that applying newer technology could accelerate existing traditional models, enabling the application of advanced AI to problems previously unaddressed by those models.

Computational Context

The hackathon is aligned with Monash University's MAVERIC initiative. MAVERIC is an AI supercomputer featuring the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 platform, which Monash University describes as the first deployment of this technology in Australia.

According to the event organizers, the hackathon provided researchers with hands-on experience building and refining AI models in a high-performance computing environment. This experience is intended to prepare researchers for scaling their work onto larger systems like MAVERIC.