Skip to content

Explainer: Workflows for users who wish to share or develop experiments and configurations

Summary

At ACCESS-NRI we want to help users share or develop experiments and configurations. Each of these tasks has subtly different workflows, we make suggestions and provide pro/cons below.

Difference between configuration and experiment.

  • A configuration (example) contains all the elements needed to begin an experiment.

  • An experiment (e.g. ESM1.6 development run pearseb-dev-20241220-1 here) contains the same files as the configuration but additional files that detail how that configuration has been run (e.g. manifests, example). Experiments have Runlog = true, which means each time the model is run their is an associated commit (example). For further information see Payu documentation.

To branch or fork?

There are 3 options for sharing configurations:

  1. On the ACCESS-NRI organisation (e.g. ACCESS-NRI/access-om3-configs), this requires write access to the repository. This would use a branch.
  2. On the ACCESS-Community-Hub organisation (e.g. ACCESS-Community-Hub/access-esm1.6-dev-experiments), this requires write access to the repository. This would also involve a branch.
  3. On a personal GitHub account (e.g. joe/access-om3-configs). This would use a fork.

Discuss pro and cons.