The main mission of ACES is to elevate environmental science research and education in Nevada to a new level of excellence by aligning it with NSF's strategic direction of increasing the application of information technology advances across science and engineering. In turn, the program will provide an application-driven environment to stimulate new information technology research of common interest to ACES computer scientists, environmental scientists and private partners. ACES is well aligned with NSF programs in Information Technology Research (ITR) and Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (PACI).

The ACES strategy is threefold:

1. create the Nevada Computing Grid (NCG) - a statewide, distributed computational and communication infrastructure - by acquiring new equipment, making several strategic hires, and integrating existing resources;
2. establish a unifying management approach and transparent access and use policies, with dedicated application level support for researchers; and
3. stimulate personal interaction through a seminar series, graduate level courses, tutorials, and workshops all accompanied by online reports for the widest possible dissemination.

New high-performance computing and scientific visualization capabilities provided by ACES will remove current limitations experienced by Nevada environmental researchers in applications of advanced numerical modeling and other data-intensive research techniques in finding answers to a wide spectrum of environmental problems and applications. ACES isexpected to foster research activities such as:

• complex modeling of groundwater flow, hydrochemistry, and floods;
• atmospheric and air quality modelin as well as coupled atmospheric/hydrologic modeling;
• climate data analysis;
• geochemistry modeling;
• applications of geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing; research and development of algorithms for high-performance computing and scientific visualization.