Models
ACCESS is a family of related computer models or components that represent different parts of the Earth-System. ACCESS links various model components through software called couplers to form different Model Configurations.
ACCESS Components
ACCESS components represent different chemical, physical or biological parts of the Earth System.
Model Configurations
Model Configurations are particular implementations of the ACCESS suite. Configurations combine separate model components to represent the interactions between the various components of the system.
National Computational Infrastructure (NCI)
All the ACCESS modelling relies on computational and data resources from the Australian National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) at ANU. High resolution model simulations may require tens of thousands of CPU cores to run at a reasonable rate. Century scale climate simulations use of order a thousand cores but may run for many months. All such simulations generate many terabytes of data which must be stored, indexed and made accessible to the wider research community.
More information:
For an overview of ACCESS and its use for climate modelling, WATCH this presentation: