E3SM Celebrating a Decade of Progress

October 2024 officially marked a decade of development in E3SM, the project has significantly progressed since its inception in October 2014.

The project started as Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME) before transitioning to its current name Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) in April 2018, which is also when the first official version of the model, v1, was released.

The E3SM Project has now reached an exciting juncture. It is on the verge of achieving its original ten-year goal articulated in 2014: build a world-class Earth system model for the US Department of Energy (DOE) mission on Exascale computation platforms. Today the project has the model of Atmosphere (EAMxx) written in C++ and fully capable of running efficiently on a GPU exascale supercomputers. Another computationally expensive component that is being re-written in C++ and GPU-enabled is the Ocean Model for E3SM Global Applications (OMEGA), which will be the ocean component of E3SM version 4. E3SMv4, scheduled to be released in 2027, will be the first exascale capable coupled earth system model.

Throughout the year we’ve been highlighting this important milestone with stories