Atomistic modelling of magnetic materials provides unprecedented detail about the underlying physical processes that govern their macroscopic properties, and allows the simulation of complex effects such as surface anisotropy, ultrafast laser-induced spin dynamics, exchange bias, and mi- crostructural effects. Here we present the key methods used in atomistic spin models which are then applied to a range of magnetic problems. We detail the parallelisation strategies used which enable the routine simulation of extended systems with full atomistic resolution.