SIMA is an effort to provide researchers with a framework that will allow them to answer frontier science questions by combining the capabilities of multiple NSF NCAR-supported weather, climate, chemistry, and geospace models. The configurable modeling tool will allow scientists to choose the components they need for a specific project — including resolution, grid meshes, dynamical cores, and physics packages — and then connect the resulting atmospheric model to representations of the ocean, land, and sea ice through the Community Earth System Model (CESM).