ECP Meeting Summaries

DOE’s Exascale Computing Project (ECP) is focused on accelerating the delivery of a capable exascale computing ecosystem that delivers 50x the application performance as compared to what was available in 2017 at the start of the project. ECP invests in a wide range of applications related to national security, energy security, and scientific discovery. For Earth system modeling, ECP has been developing a new exascale-ready configuration of the E3SM model, E3SM-MMF (see related article on E3SM-MMF). This configuration uses a Multiscale Modeling Framework to couple a weather-resolving atmosphere model containing a cloud-resolving model (CRM) that replaces the traditional suite of parameterizations.

The ECP Project held its annual meeting on January 17-20, 2023 in Houston TX. This was the first large in-person meeting since 2020. There were over 500 participants from DOE labs, industry, and other agencies. As 2023 is expected to be the last year of the ECP project, the meeting was focused on then-and-now comparisons, showcasing DOE’s exascale systems and the exascale readiness of many of DOE’s key applications.

The E3SM-MMF project presented results from their “Challenge Problem”, on the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) Summit system using 10,000 NVIDIA V100 GPUs. The challenge problem uses a fully coupled configuration of E3SM-MMF with O(1 km) resolution in the CRM, O(25 km) resolution for the global atmosphere model grid, and an eddy-resolving ocean and ice models with O(6-18 km) resolution. This configuration was able to achieve 2.03 Simulated Years Per Day (SYPD), with the atmosphere running at 5.27 SYPD. This throughput represents a 185x improvement compared to the baseline cloud-resolving capabilities available in 2017. This is close to meeting the project’s final metric, which is specified as the computational performance that would permit a 10-member ensemble to produce 100 simulated years in 1 calendar year on the U.S.’s first exascale system, OLCF Frontier.

Resources

• ECP meeting page Exascale Computing Project Annual Meeting | Home 
• The 2023 meeting’s Agenda Exascale Computing Project Annual Meeting | Agenda