November 4, 2025
In this article we speak with Manodeep Sinha, a Principal Research Software Engineer in the Software Transformation team at ACCESS-NRI.
Where did you grow up, and how did you come to be part of the ACCESS-NRI team?
I grew up in India, but then I lived in USA for about 13 years, before moving to Melbourne in 2015. Having spent more than a decade in each of the three countries, I have a mish-mash of Indian, American and Australian characteristics. However, my love for the Indian men’s cricket team runs deep.
Two key characteristics of ACCESS-NRI attracted me:
- solving critical issues like weather and climate change
- being part of the first national NCRIS facility whose remit primarily is around research software.
However, I thought ACCESS-NRI required staff to be based in Canberra. Given that I was not planning to move out of Melbourne, I assumed that working at ACCESS-NRI was not an option. This was until one of the initial ACCESS-NRI interns (from astronomy) mentioned that ACCESS-NRI had remote staff based in Melbourne. Then a performance optimisation role opened up when I was looking for a new role, and the rest is history.
I have now been at ACCESS-NRI for nearly 1 year and love working here.
Tell us a bit about your career before joining ACCESS-NRI.
My career trajectory is long and circuitous. My undergrad was in electrical engineering and then I worked for a software company for a year, before deciding to pursue a PhD in astronomy in the USA. After 13 years in the USA, I moved to Melbourne for yet another postdoc position.
By the time I joined ACCESS-NRI, I was renowned within astronomy for improving software performance and won the national astronomy research software award in 2023 for Software that enables ‘impossible’ research.
I am a strong advocate for open and reproducible research, and organisation policies that reduce systemic exclusion for marginalised communities. Guided by these values, I have been a leader for multiple national communities: the Chair for the Early Career Researcher Chapter of Australian Astronomers (2017–2020), and the co-founder for the RSE community across Australia and New Zealand (2017–present). As a community leader, my philosophy has been to centre people’s needs first, and push for actions that improve the recognition and support that the community members deserve, but typically do not receive.
What do you do at ACCESS-NRI, and what excites you about this work?
My role is about performance optimisation within the Software Transformation team at ACCESS-NRI. This translates to getting the ACCESS-NRI supported software to run fast and reliably on national high performance computing infrastructure (NCI’s Gadi at this point, but the Model Release team are investigating how to deploy models on Pawsey’s Setonix).
Currently, we are in the final stages of model development of the Earth System Model ACCESS-ESM1.6 for phase 7 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP7) fast-track experiments, and I am focussed on improving the runtime performance of the model. This is a once-off opportunity to optimise the ACCESS-ESM1.6 configuration, which is intended to be frozen after being released.
There is also the community appreciation aspect of my role. I spoke to quite a few people at the last ACCESS Community Workshop, and most people were interested in getting better performance, including for the current Earth System Model ACCESS-ESM1.5. Spencer Wong (from the Atmosphere Model team) and I did some performance tweaks, and we managed to improve the ACCESS-ESM1.5 throughput by nearly 50% (to be released in the near future). It is quite fulfilling knowing that your work is relevant and improves/enables other people’s research.
I love performance optimisation. This is what I was renowned for within astrophysics, and now I am grateful that that’s what I get to do on a daily basis.
What do you like to do outside of work?
We have two young kids (6 & 3 years old) and all our “free-time” is involved in taking care of the kids. We love going for beach vacations in Cowes, which is a small town about a 1.5-hour drive from Melbourne. Cowes is a happy place for the entire family; the kids love running on the beach, going into the shallow (and safe) waters there, and going for after-dinner walks on the beach.