E3SM – A Decade of Progress: Fun Facts – Slogans
In the 10 years of E3SM so far, the team has generated a number of what might be called slogans, mottos, or sayings, with topics ranging from estimated timelines to project unity, and tones ranging from serious to humorous.
Perhaps the most important of these is the project’s main slogan:
DOE Model for DOE Mission on DOE Computers.
On project unity and in-house capabilities:
- “Project before lab” and “Carryover belongs to the project, not the labs!” – Dave Bader, E3SM Principal Investigator, when hearing about issues involving lab management.
- “No critical path through…[insert external groups]” — a useful mantra to ensure we have enough expertise in-house to build and maintain our own model.
- “The 30”, a play on the film titled “300”, poked fun at the oft-repeated claim that what E3SM really needed was a core group of 30 really dedicated developers rather than the typical National Laboratory approach of sharing people across several projects. While it is still a goal of the project to have staff working at larger fractions of time, we have yet to get to the 30 brave Spartans.
On leadership:
- “Project management is not a democracy” – Dave Bader
On time:
- “The first 90% of the work takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the next 90% of the time” – the Human-Earth System Feedbacks (HES) group, highlighting the asymptotic nature of time estimates.
On unproven ideas:
- “What are you not going to do?” and “You know me, I want a roadmap, with epics, effort assignment and deliverables” – Dave Bader, when asked for permission to work on a shiny new idea.
- “Don’t show me your ML [machine learning] parameterization until it has run stably in E3SM for >10 yrs!” – Peter Caldwell.
- “Nothing is really new” – Dave Bader, before giving “some obscure anecdote from the Stone Age.”
On keeping a sense of humor despite challenging problems:
- “There’s a hole in my ocean” was coined by Dorothy Koch during a period where the project was trying to track down non-conservation issues across the model, some of which were being attributed to the ocean. The root cause in a coupled system where all components are interacting is often difficult to track down. This exercise also spawned the Deep Dives song set to the tune of “Hole in my Bucket, Dear Liza.”
On early-ACME (Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy, the predecessor of E3SM) growing pains when we had to grow our own Software Engineering (SE) team:
- “Did you protect it with a test?” – SE Group response to “You broke my workflow!”
- “I miss the perl build scripts” – nobody
