Overview of All-Hands, Advisory and Leadership Meetings

Group Photo – 2019 Fall E3SM Meeting

Annually, the E3SM project holds an Advisory Meeting, one or two Leadership Meetings, and two All-Hands Meetings (a spring working meeting focusing on planning and a fall gathering concentrated on science-related topics). This year, the fall schedule was packed, starting with a one-day Advisory Meeting, followed by three days of the Fall All-Hands Meeting, and rounded out by a one-day E3SM Leadership Meeting. In all, the week was extremely productive, but fairly exhausting for the leadership team.

The meetings took place in the Washington, D.C. area at the Crystal City DoubleTree Hotel, November 19 to November 21, 2019.

The Advisory Committee listened to the comprehensive overview of the entire project with talks on project progress and future direction, science strategy and metrics for progress, as well as the current and future project’s HPC strategy. Each Core Group and all Next Generation Development (NGD) sub-projects gave presentations on achievements thus far and future plans. Several Advisory Committee members were not able to attend, but the participating advisors (Jon Petch (chair), Mighua Zhang, Anand Gnanadesikan, and Paul Fischer) agreed that the project had made very impressive progress and had achieved a model that has comparable performance to other CMIP6 models. The Advisory Committee was impressed with the large number of publications already coming from the model development and evaluation activities. The Committee recognized that the following were key to the success of the project so far: strong leadership, investment in critical aspects of computational science, and investment in technical infrastructure and support. Committee members advised the project to continue in these successful activities. The Committee also addressed several specific questions about the project and its direction. The E3SM leadership team agreed with the Committee’s recommendations for improvements and is committed to making steady progress toward this end. For example, the team is continuing to work on defining and executing DOE-focused metrics to monitor progress, as well as defining future model versions and simulation plans.

The 2019 Fall E3SM All-Hands Meeting was centered around the following topics:

• E3SM project status and future plans
• Updates on Core Group and NGD activities
• Facilitation of group and cross-group discussions and coordination
• Invited science talks from E3SM team members, Advisory Committee members, and university and ecosystem projects working on E3SM-related and E3SM-relevant research
• Discussion of coordination across projects
• Two Posters Sessions
• Awards and Live music by the E3SM Deep Dives Band

The full week was rounded out by the E3SM Leadership meeting where future roadmaps for all groups were discussed and timeline future model and data release. The team’s goal is to finish the v2 new features integration effort and tag the model with version 2.0 by the end of June 2020. At that point, the v2 simulation campaign will begin. At the same time, the leadership team will be defining version 3 of the model. The water cycle v2 campaign should be finished within a year, at the end of June 2021. The E3SM v2 model configuration, documentation and data release will follow. In July 2021, review of phase 2 and defense of the phase 3 proposal will commence. More details on the timeline can be seen on internal project confluence website, see E3SM-v3.0 Timeline (internal page) and overall E3SM-Version Timeline (internal page).