May 22, 2024
In short: The ACCESS land surface model (CABLE) code is now hosted on the GitHub platform. GitHub integration is an important step in making the code more open and discoverable, and allows it to use the new ACCESS-NRI integration and deployment software pipeline.
Modelling soils and vegetation is a critical element to simulate our climate and weather. This is known as land surface modelling. ACCESS has a specific land surface model called Community Atmosphere Biosphere Land Exchange (CABLE), developed with Australian land uniqueness in mind. CABLE simulates energy, water and carbon flows between the land surface and the atmosphere and has been developed by researchers from across the national climate science community.
In November 2023, the ACCESS-NRI Land Surface Modeling team moved the CABLE model code to be hosted on the GitHub platform upgrading to git version control system which is an important step to create an easy, clear and robust software infrastructure.
This change of the underlying infrastructure for the CABLE code is already showing benefits in the way CABLE is being developed.
“The change of hosting platform to git/GitHub brings a range of benefits. Firstly, it aligns with our goal of Open Science by hosting CABLE publicly and improving its discoverability. Additionally, GitHub provides integrations and services to simplify the code management and collaborative development,” says Dr Claire Carouge, Team leader of the Land Surface Modelling Team.
CABLE’s move to GitHub also enables CABLE to use the new software pipeline system that was recently put in place by the ACCESS-NRI Model Release team.
“The ability to use the new ACCESS-NRI software pipeline aligns with our goal to use a unified infrastructure to build, release, control quality and manage provenance of the models released by ACCESS-NRI, providing a seamless experience to users between models and streamlined support across the models”, says Dr Carouge.
Finally, the migration to GitHub has improved both the users’ experience and heightened the capability for collaborative development.
Dr Claire Carouge highlights that “users with on-going work have been able to transition directly to the new system with minimal effort. GitHub also facilitates collaborative development.”
As an example of the benefits of using GitHub, recently a user’s suggestions on a technical development have been implemented into CABLE by the ACCES-NRI development team. Previously, without the ease of collaboration that GitHub provides, development happened in silos with no visibility outside the people involved.
“By having CABLE on GitHub, we are encouraging more collaboration across all the users of CABLE, thereby making CABLE more relevant and useful for the research community,” says Dr Carouge.
Interested in running CABLE? You can find the CABLE User Guide here
Release information can be found on the ACCESS-Hive Forum here
Need support? See the ACCESS Help and Support topic for details on how to get help from our team!
ACCESS-NRI modelling relies on computational and data resources from high-performance supercomputers operated by Australia’s National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) located at The Australian National University.
ACCESS-NRI and NCI are enabled by the Australian Government, Department of Education, through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).