Supported Machines

E3SM is supported for all users of the following platforms

• Perlmutter at NERSC

• Frontier at OLCF

• Polaris at ALCF

Supported machines that are for E3SM-project staff only.

• Compy at PNNL

• Chrysalis and Anvil at ANL

Other machines

In general, E3SM should run well on any cluster with a fast network (e.g. Infiniband, not just ethernet).

E3SM is highly configurable and its possible to define cases (such as single column) that will run on a laptop or workstation.

The per-node memory requirements depend on the resolution and components used.

Software prerequisites

The following are the external system and software requirements for installing and running E3SM.  (Started from CESM1.2 pre reqs.)

• UNIX-style operating system such as CNL, AIX and Linux

• csh, bash shells

• A recent version of the Perl scripting language (5.16+), plus the following modules:

  • XML::SAX  (from  LibXML module)

  • XML::SAX::Exception ( from the LibXML module)

  • Switch (Switch.pm)

• subversion client version 1.4.2 or greater (for downloading CESM-originating data files)

• Git version 2.0 or newer (for getting source code)

• Fortran (2003 support required) and C/C++ compilers.

• MPI (although E3SM does not absolutely require it for running on one processor)

• One or both of NetCDF 4.6.1 or newer and pnetcdf, 1.6.1 or newer. (E3SM can use PnetCDF if NetCDF is not installed).

• CMake 3.16 18 or newer is required 

• Python 3.10 or newer is required for E3SM-specific build/test scripts.

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The second column is the versions E3SM is tested withuses in its nightly testing.  Different machines have different versions.

NOTE: we see lots of variation in model behavior between compiler versions. If you don’t have exactly the same compiler version as what we are testing, you may encounter problems that we can’t help with.

The third column lists test suites we run for each compiler-version matched by color. We do not run all suites with all compiler versions because of the expense and time involved.