E3SM-Unified 1.8.0 release notes

Owned by Xylar Asay-Davis
Last updated: Dec 06, 2022 by Jill Chengzhu Zhang
3 min read

Dear E3SM Team,

A new version of E3SM-Unified is available: 1.8.0.  E3SM-Unified is a combination conda and spack environment that includes a large amount of analysis software that is useful for E3SM users.  The new version includes updates to E3SM-Diags, e3sm_to_cmip, MPAS-Analysis, MOAB, NCO, xcdat, zppy, zstash and many more packages.

New and improved in 1.8.0

E3SM Diags: 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. More updates can be found in the v2.8.0 Release Notes.

e3sm_to_cmip: v1.9.0 and v1.9.1 were released since the previous E3SM-unified version. New features include support for E3SM v2 MPAS variables and nco>=5.11. They also include various bug fixes for accessing the underlying variable data using xarray and/or numpy. More updates can be found in the v1.9.0 and v1.9.1 release notes.

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. More updates can be found in the v1.8.0 Release Notes.

MOAB: Preliminary support for bilinear maps (serial only), several bug fixes, and memory usage/performance improvements for offline map generation. For more information, refer to the detailed release notes for v5.4.0 and v5.4.1.

NCO: Compression support improved, ncremap supports EAMxx and new vertical interpolation methods, NCZarr support added, see the release notes for versions 5.1.1-5.1.3

xcdat: There have been several releases since the previous E3SM-unified including v0.3.1, v0.3.2, v0.3.3, and most recently v0.4.0. All of these releases address various bug fixes for features such as spatial/temporal averaging and horizontal regridding. v0.4.0 introduces includes a feature update to support datasets that have N dimensions mapped to N coordinates to represent an axis.updates (e.g., E3SM native datasets). See the changelog for a complete list of updates.

zppy: zppy 2.2.0 adds Perlmutter support and hemispheric averaging in time series. More updates can be found in the v2.2.0 Release Notes.

zstash: zstash 1.3.0 adds an option to retry hsi get if it is unsuccessful. It also optimizes Globus transfers. More updates can be found in the v1.3.0 Release Notes.

Activation

As in previous versions, you can access the environment as usual by sourcing an activation script:

Acme1:

source /p/user_pub/e3sm_unified/envs/load_latest_e3sm_unified_acme1.sh

Andes:

source /gpfs/alpine/proj-shared/cli115/e3sm-unified/load_latest_e3sm_unified_andes.sh

Anvil:

source /lcrc/soft/climate/e3sm-unified/load_latest_e3sm_unified_anvil.sh

Chrysalis:

source /lcrc/soft/climate/e3sm-unified/load_latest_e3sm_unified_chrysalis.sh

Compy:

source /share/apps/E3SM/conda_envs/load_latest_e3sm_unified_compy.sh

Note: there is a known issue regarding the NCO remapping utility error on Compy in the recent two e3sm_unified releases (v1.7 and v1.8), which may also impact downstream application such as E3SM Diags and zppy , E3SM-unified Compy users can use v1.6 as a work-around before this issue is addressed.

Cori-Haswell:

source /global/common/software/e3sm/anaconda_envs/load_latest_e3sm_unified_cori-haswell.sh

Perlmutter (CPU nodes):

source /global/common/software/e3sm/anaconda_envs/load_latest_e3sm_unified_pm-cpu.sh

Details

After 5 weeks of testing, the new version has been deployed on most machines: Acme1, Andes, Anvil, Chrysalis, Compy, Cori-Haswell, and Perlmutter. We have dropped support for Badger, Cooley and Cori-KNL 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 you load E3SM-Unified on a compute node, you will have access to these versions, which can be run in parallel and which 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.  To request packages and versions to include, make a comment on Next Version.

As always, please email me if there are any questions, or post an issue at https://github.com/E3SM-Project/e3sm-unified/issues.

Cheers,

Xylar and the Infrastructure Team