October 19, 2023
The Department of Education, through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) has announced today the results of their 2023 NCRIS Funding Round.
The Australian Earth System Simulator (ACCESS-NRI) has received an additional $9,642,548 over the next 4 years – which will include compute and storage and funding in areas like ice sheet modelling, land modelling and evaluation, Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 7 (CMIP7) development and software transformation.
“We are excited to be able to announce this extra funding, which we will use extend and enhance climate and weather modelling software for Australian researchers, as well as contribute to a successful Australian coupled model submission delivery globally” said ACCESS –NRI Director, Professor Andy Hogg.
The following ACCESS-NRI activities have been included on this funding round:
Expanding Australia’s Land and Earth System Modelling for the Carbon Economy
Australian researchers are preparing a community approach to deliver an ACCESS submission to the World Climate Research Program’s Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, phase 7 (CMIP7) expected in 2027. This Activity will contribute to the Australian CMIP7 submission through enhanced infrastructure enabling model development and evaluation. This Activity will create and maintain the shared modelling infrastructure needed to support climate adaptation efforts. It will bring new capacity from standalone land modelling innovations into the coupled system, including soil carbon dynamics, fire and agriculture ecosystem water use changes. It will be informed by TERN data streams that are not yet in the model testing framework, and will enhance model evaluation capabilities to support the model development cycle. It will also upgrade the coupling between ACCESS atmosphere, ocean and land components to create a modular framework which enables cross-sector modelling communities to deliver insights on future climate.
Funding Received; $2,682,819, 2 years funding.
Coastal Research Infrastructure (CoastRI) – Modelling
The Coastal Research Infrastructure (CoastRI) Initiative is a coordinated NCRIS-wide effort to create a step change in Australian coastal research. The initiative involves a consultation led by IMOS to refine community needs to prepare for a major submission in 2024, while some small, targeted coastal programs are requesting immediate support.
ACCESS-NRI’s request focuses on: 1. ice sheet modelling capability and 2. a coastal ocean modelling commons. A central theme of CoastRI is the impact of sea level rise and coastal inundation. In the coming decades, the largest contributions to sea level rise will come from the melting and deglaciation of land ice: Greenland, alpine glaciers and Antarctica. Land ice models that are coupled with climate models are required to reduce the uncertainty of projections of future global mean and regional sea level rise. CoastRI will expand Australia’s Earth system model framework, ACCESS, to include land ice, and the critical feedbacks between ocean, sea ice, atmosphere and land that control ice sheet change. CoastRI will also establish a co-ordinated coastal modelling framework to provide infrastructure for existing independent modelling communities to integrate their expertise. The framework will interface with a large-scale, nation-wide “backbone” model; it will accelerate model development by facilitating shared configurations, documentation and evaluation systems to create tools at regional and local scales relevant to decision makers.
Funding Received: $2,459,729. Coastal Ocean Modelling 2 years funding. Ice Sheet Modelling 3 years funding and workshops to select ice sheet model.
Software Transformation, Compute and Storage
Background:
The hardware that underpins High-Performance Computing has evolved rapidly over the last decade. In Earth system modelling, the software behind every component model is built on legacy code that may be decades old. New models, based on modern architecture take up to 15 years to fully mature, which is longer than the rapidly evolving hardware ecosystem. This Activity enables a “Software Transformation Team” to bring the specialist software engineering skills required for the ACCESS modelling framework to take advantage of advances in computing hardware, and to position ACCESS for future changes in technology. The team will port and optimise new models, including the GPUenabled LFRic atmosphere model planned for future implementation in ACCESS. They will enhance the scalability of our diagnostics packages as data volumes expand, and augment model physics with machine learning. The ultimate goal is to prepare Australian researchers for the future transition to exascale computing. The exascale transition will increase the compute and storage resource footprint of Earth system modelling. ACCESS-NRI supports a community of researchers that use common platforms, sharing code, data and tools to multiply the efficiency of research activities in this field. This Activity will purchase the compute and storage resources from NCI that Australian researchers need to conduct and analyse their simulations, and for ACCESS-NRI to conduct software testing, optimisation and development.
Funding Received: $4,500,000 increase the Software Transformation Teams as well additional compute and storage to support increased capacity requirements.
More details on the funding for each NCRIS facility can be found here
