As per previous conferences, eResearch Australasia 2024 in Melbourne had several hundred attendees from the scientific research community, research computing developers and operators, administrators and managers, and various vendors. The program gives a very good indication of the level of this conference and the reason that it has been such a success over the last fifteen years and more.

For the first time in the post-COVID environment, the conference was a face-to-face event and a very welcome opportunity to network with old colleagues in this environment as well as the opportunity to discover new people and new developments (as well as hearing some salacious gossip of changes in the eResearch landscape). Various presentations on artificial intelligence and machine learning (away from the current hype over Large Language Models) was prevalent, especially with regard to astounding developments in bioinformatics, of which the developers of Alphafold, the AI program that predicts protein structures, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is a prominent example.

My own presentation was on the development of the Spartan general-purpose high performance computing system at the University of Melbourne, which started as a small-scale and very experimental system operating on a shoestring budget, to one of the top systems in the world. I'm pleased to say that the talk seemed to be very well received to the crowded room (my head count was at least 70) and with a number of people asking for the slide deck afterwards; based on the comments from others, Spartan is extremely well regarded within the Australian eResearch community for these successes and for our extensive training program.