NCI Australia warmly welcomes Tuesday night’s Federal Budget announcement of $7.6 million of funding for ACCESS, the Australian Community Climate and Earth System Simulator, to become a National Research Infrastructure. Congratulations to the Australian climate and weather research community for this recognition of their role as an essential element of a safe and successful Australia.

The ACCESS suite of models couple together models of the atmosphere, oceans, land and sea ice to understand the behaviour of the Earth system as a whole. The ACCESS-NRI will turn ACCESS into software infrastructure that, along with NCI’s high performance data and computing infrastructure, will provide the research tools and research collaboration needed to address national challenges associated with weather and climate risk and environmental change.

NCI Director Professor Sean Smith celebrates the extensive history between NCI and the researchers that developed ACCESS.

“NCI supercomputing power has been pivotal in the development of the ACCESS suite of models since their inception. We look forward to supporting the ACCESS-NRI as it takes the already successful ACCESS models to the next level, and as it becomes part of Australia’s excellent National Collaborative Research Infrastructure System, NCRIS.

Running the ACCESS models is a hugely CPU and data intensive process. NCI’s Gadi supercomputer is the only system available to researchers that can run ACCESS. The ACCESS-NRI will keep Australia at the forefront of international weather and climate modelling, and provide the leadership around technical and software innovations required to move many other areas of computing and data intensive research to exascale."

Read more about the ACCESS model and how it runs at NCI in our stories Scaling massive models and Developing the latest climate models.