A powerful potential role of devolved cluster resources is in integrated sensor and simulation systems of the sort sketched in the figure below.

Fluid laboratories are already used in Earth science teaching at MIT, research in ACES will explore how to combine the laboratory sensor assets and the ACES compute assets. Under a proposed FLuid And Numerical Experiment Laboratory (FLANEL) ACES would support a unique testbed environment for researching planetary scale assimilation. The key elments of a proposed FLANEL system are shown in the poster below.