The Trifid supercomputer, located at VPAC in Carlton South, will be capable of 45.9 trillion calculations per second, employing 180 nodes and with a 165 terabyte storage array.

"Our significant investment in this joint HPC [high performance computing] facility will provide our researchers with a ten-fold capability increase that enables them to better understand the nature of proteins and complex materials for next generation solar cells, more effectively model medical radiation used in cancer treatments, and support the breadth of engineering applications," professor Heinz Schmidt, RMIT's eResearch director, said in a statement.

Professor Tim Brown, deputy vice-chancellor at La Trobe, said the university is looking to address global problems through the use of supercomputing.

"Linking disciplines and strong researchers will be a key, but these cross-disciplinary approaches often require the latest in computational power to explore the solutions and find the best. So infrastructure like this is a vital component in the La Trobe strategy," he said.