E3SM-Unified 1.8.0 was Released

We are excited to announce that a new version of E3SM-Unified, 1.8.0, was released in early December 2022.

The E3SM project maintains a unified Conda environment, called E3SM-Unified, to ensure that all E3SM-supported software tools are available, coexist together and work seamlessly. All packages upon which the tools depend are included and coordinated to ensure that all tool dependencies are satisfied. Simply by installing this environment, any of the E3SM-supported tools are readily accessible to use.

This new version of E3SM-Unified is a combination of conda and spack environments that includes a collection of a large number of analysis software packages that have been useful for E3SM users. The new version includes updates to several packages developed by the E3SM team including E3SM-Diags, e3sm_to_cmip, MPAS-Analysis, MOAB, NCO, xcdat, zppy, and zstash.

E3SM-Unified is available on 7 machines supported by E3SM: Acme1 (LLNL), Andes (ORNL), Anvil (ANL), Chrysalis (ANL), Compy (PNNL), Cori (NERSC), and Perlmutter (NERSC). It can also be installed on a personal machine as a conda package.

New and improved in 1.8.0

E3SM Diags: The newest version adds MERRA2 aerosol data for AOD diagnostics, Aerosol Budget Tables (set name: “aerosol_budget”), and an example for running with zppy. Other changes include fixing a matplotlib rotation bug and removing cdtime as a dependency.

e3sm_to_cmip: New features in the latest version includes support for E3SM v2 MPAS variables and nco>=5.11. It also includes various bug fixes for accessing the underlying variable data using xarray and/or numpy.

MPAS-Analysis: New features have been added from the recent E3SM hackathon on MPAS-Analysis: Arctic regional analysis, barotropic streamfunctions, sea-ice production, and melting and sea-surface height histograms.

MOAB: The latest releases bring in preliminary support for bilinear maps (serial only), several bug fixes, and memory usage/performance improvements for offline map generation.

NCO: Improvements to NCO include better compression support, ncremap support for EAMxx and new vertical interpolation methods, support for NCZarr, and a fix to ncremap on Compy (included in the subsequent E3SM-Unified 1.8.1 release).

xcdat: The latest releases address various bug fixes for features such as spatial/temporal averaging and horizontal regridding. The latest version introduces a feature update to support datasets that have N dimensions mapped to N coordinates to represent axis updates (e.g., E3SM native datasets).

zppy: The latest version adds Perlmutter support and hemispheric averaging in time series.

zstash: The latest zstash adds an option to retry hsi get if it is unsuccessful. It also optimizes Globus transfers.

Details

After 5 weeks of testing, the new version has been deployed on the 7 supported machines. We have dropped support for the machines: Badger (LANL), Cooley (ANL), and Cori-KNL (NERSC) in this release.

On 5 machines (Anvil, Chrysalis, Compy, Cori-Haswell, and Perlmutter) there are 5 important packages — ESMF, MOAB, NCO, TempestExtremes, and TempestRemap — that have been built with Spack with system compilers and MPI libraries (matching the modules used for E3SM whenever possible).  When users load E3SM-Unified on a compute node, they will have access to these versions, which can be run in parallel and will typically run more efficiently than their counterparts in conda packages.

The ILAMB package is also available only on compute nodes because it, too, is built with the system MPI.

Next version

Testing of the next version (1.9.0) is planned to begin in early June 2023 and deployment is expected in early July. The community can request a new package or changes in the next E3SM-Unified by posting an issue on GitHub.

Resources

• main page: E3SM Unified Environment
• Latest Suite of Analysis Tools: E3SM-Unified 1.5.0
• E3SM-Unified Environment Update
• E3SM Unified Environment v1.3.0

Contact

• Xylar Asay-Davis, Los Alamos National Laboratory