E3SM-Unified 1.9.1 release notes

Owned by Xylar Asay-Davis
Last updated: Nov 15, 2023

Dear E3SM Team,

A new bug-fix release of E3SM-Unified is available: 1.9.1.  E3SM-Unified is a combination conda and spack environment that includes a large amount of analysis and pre- and post-processing software for E3SM users.  The new version includes updates to MOAB, NCO, zppy, and zstash packages.

Bug fixes and improvements in 1.9.1

MOAB 5.5.1:

  • New ESMF format NC reader support

  • Improved support for reading MPAS files directly

  • Improved API documentation now available

  • Fix several outstanding issues in mbtempest tool

    • Propagate grid_dims correctly for RLL grids

    • Store history metadata as attributes for provenance

  • A new halo-exchange example to measure performance of nearest-neighbor halo-exchange communication kernels

  • Several configuration and build updates for running on ALCF and OLCF systems

NCO 5.1.9:

zppy 2.3.1:

A new parameter keep_mvm_case_name_in_fig enables turning on and off ref_name in e3sm_diags figure names in model vs model case. The current IICE comparison viewer will work seamlessly again with e3sm_diags output generated with keep_mvm_case_name_in_fig=False for model vs model runs.

Additionally, the default set order for E3SM Diags has been returned to its original order, and the machine name can now be discovered on compute nodes while using E3SM Unified.

zstash 1.4.1:

Globus endpoints are beginning to require extra consents. This latest version of zstash addresses this issue by automatically prompting the user for authentication credentials to provide these consents, if required.

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

Chicoma:

source /usr/projects/e3sm/e3sm-unified/load_latest_e3sm_unified_chicoma-cpu.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

Frontier:

source /ccs/proj/cli115/software/e3sm-unified/load_latest_e3sm_unified_frontier.sh

Perlmutter (CPU nodes):

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

Details

A few critical bugs were revealed after the release of 1.9.0 in September and these are fixed here. The new version has been deployed on most supported machines: Andes, Anvil, Chicoma, Chrysalis, Compy, Frontier and Perlmutter. It will be deployed on Acme1 later this week.

Note: We encourage users at OLCF to use Andes, rather than Frontier, for processing and analysis.

On 6 machines (Anvil, Chicoma, Chrysalis, Compy, Frontier and Perlmutter) there are 6 packages of interest -- ESMF, ILAMB, MOAB, NCO, TempestExtremes and TempestRemap -- that have been built with Spack using system compilers and MPI libraries.  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.

Next version

Testing of the next version (1.10.0) is planned to begin in early February 2024 and deployment is expected in early March.  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