13.04.2022

As part of the German Earth System Modeling Strategy, a national support team funded within the natESM project started its work in November 2021 to provide targeted support for climate model development on technically oriented issues in so-called "sprints" (work packages within agile software development). Together with the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), DKRZ offers the possibility for joint software development of ESM components on HPC systems.

Depending on the type and complexity of a request, the "support team" distinguishes between short consulting with a duration of less than one month and detailed consulting including programming work with a duration of up to 6 months.

In January 2022, the support team received the first applications. In February, these 13 requests, which were very diverse and often complex, have been presented and discussed at a virtual community workshop. After in-depth discussion the following four requests were selected by the steering committee for the first natESM sprints:

  • ICON-ART: Analysis of the ICON-ART code (Aerosol and Reactive Trace gases) for GPU porting
  • mHM-ICON-YAC: Online coupling of ICON and the mesoscale hydrological model (mHM) using the YAC coupler.
  • FESOM: Porting of selected components of the sea ice ocean model FESOM2.1 to GPU-based systems at DKRZ and JSC.
  • ParFlow: Optimizing memory management and improving portability of the ParFlow hydrological model by moving from CUDA code to the HIP interface.

Other applications have been deferred with proposals for revision for the upcoming round. There will be further selection processes throughout the year for which new applications can be submitted at any time. More information on sprint submission at: https:/nat-esm.com/services/request-for-sprints.

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natesm_RGB.pngnatESM: A national modeling strategy for the future and the climate research community
Earth System Models (ESMs) allow a better understanding of climate processes and their impacts on society. Necessary advances in simulation require more comprehensive and higher resolution models running on the most powerful supercomputers (HPC) currently available. This usually requires new programming adapted to the hardware. The increasingly complex systems thus pose ever greater challenges to model and software development.
In the natESM project, initially funded for three years by the BMBF, DKRZ together with the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) offers HPC expertise and support for software development of ESM components on HPC systems through a national support team. While various scientific institutes in Germany are further developing individual model components in terms of scientific content, technically questions regarding HPC software development are now to be addressed collectively in order to better organize the further development of highly complex Earth system models in the future or to make this technically possible at all.
Project website: https://nat-esm.de