Heerdegen A1, Basevi J1, McAdam T1
1ACCESS-NRI, Canberra, Australia
Biography:
Aidan is the Leader of the ACCESS-NRI Model Release Team, which provides infrastructure to build, test, release and curate ACCESS Models for the Australian Research Community.
Aidan has PhD from the Research School of Chemistry at ANU and has previously worked in computational climate modelling support for two ARC Centres of Excellence.
Abstract:
ACCESS-NRI sub-licenses climate modelling software from the UK Met Office (UKMO) and authenticates it use. Affiliation of users with a licensed Australian research partner must be confirmed and requires connecting their user identity on UKMO systems and an HPC partner (NCI) where the software is used. An automated workflow provides a reliable and consistent interface for our users, and audit trails for reporting to the licensor. Identity, and particularly affiliation, can be messy in the eResearch space. People move, have multiple affiliations, and don't always use them consistently. This makes establishing identity across multiple infrastructure providers difficult.
Australian Access Federation (AAF) authentication is the authoritative source of identity and affiliation with a licensed organisation. This links with AAF authenticated identity on the ACCESS-Hive Forum: A Discourse forum administered and run by ACCESS-NRI. The forum can aggregate multiple identities in a single location and provides useful functionality to add licensed users to groups for visibility, messaging, and reporting.
Django provides the web portal, AAF authentication, database connection and orchestrates connections to the Discourse forum, NCI and UKMO infrastructure. The Django server and database are hosted on Nectar Research Cloud. Discourse is SAAS on a Discourse hosting plan.
The web portal has been operational since February 2026. Over one hundred users have successfully authenticated and so can access climate modelling software for their research.
This is an example of Nectar hosted eResearch infrastructure using AAF authentication to establish and link identity across multiple infrastructure providers both within Australia and with international partners.
