This is a draft for collaborative editing until the release in early August.
Dear E3SM Team,
A new version of E3SM-Unified is available: 1.9.0. 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 ChemDyg, E3SM-Diags, e3sm_to_cmip, MPAS-Analysis, MOAB, NCO, xcdat, zppy, zstash and many more packages.
New and improved in 1.9.0
ChemDyg 0.1.2: This new package provides diagnostics for the interactive gas-phase chemistry, newly available in E3SM, to support routine testing and evaluation of the chemistry performance.
E3SM Diags 2.9.0:
e3sm_to_cmip 1.10.0: This minor release includes a major revamp in the implementation of land and atm variable handlers. Handlers are now defined a single yaml file rather than as individual Python modules. More information can be found in the Variable Handlers documentation page.
The __main__.py module for running e3sm_to_cmip has also been refactored with a new E3SMtoCMIP class, which gets instantiated as objects e3sm_to_cmip runs. This makes executing, debugging, and testing e3sm_to_cmip significantly easier compared to running from the CLI and hoping things work. More information can be found in the Development Guide documentation page.
In general, the documentation was updated to make it more readable and informative. A new bash script was added to serve as an example for how to execute e3sm_to_cmip for end-to-end processing and cmorization of variables.
MPAS-Analysis 1.9.0: This release adds new waves analysis and moves to Adusumilli et al. (2020) for Antarctic melt-rate observations as well as numerous minor enhancements and bug fixes listed in the MPAS-Analysis v1.9.0 release notes.
MOAB 5.5.0: Significant improvements in both robustness and performance for parallel, conservative map generation, and extensions to support bilinear map projections through TempestRemap v2.2.0.
NCO 5.1.7: Simplified invocation of quantization and codecs. CF-compliant longitude boundaries. Fixes for Intel compilers. NCZarr features. Vertical interpolation improvements. EAMxx support.
xcdat 0.5.0: This long-awaited minor release includes feature updates to support an optional user-specified climatology reference period when calculating climatologies and departures, and improved support for using custom time coordinates in temporal APIs.
This release also includes a bug fix for singleton coordinates breaking the swap_lon_axis() function. Additionally, Jupyter Notebooks for presentations and demos have been added to the documentation.
zppy 2.3.0:
zstash 1.4.0:
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
Perlmutter (CPU nodes):
source /global/common/software/e3sm/anaconda_envs/load_latest_e3sm_unified_pm-cpu.sh
Details
After 7 weeks of testing, the new version has been deployed on our supported machines: Acme1, Andes, Anvil, Chrysalis, Compy, and Perlmutter. We have dropped support for Cori-Haswell (decommissioned). We hope to add support for Frontier but we encourage users at OLCF to use Andes for analysis.
On 4 machines (Anvil, Chrysalis, Compy 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 (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.
Next version
Testing of the next version (1.10.0) is planned to begin in early November 2023 and deployment is expected in early December. 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