https://medium.com/@yonas.mersha14/installing-porting-running-community-earth-system-model-c5f6ebfc613e
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8 min read
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Oct 19, 2022
Hi everyone, One of the challenges for climate, atmosphere, land, & ecological modelers is configuring, porting, & running fully coupled Earth System Models (ESM). This is not a trivial task and will require some technical knowledge. It involves installing and compiling compatible compilers and libraries from source code and precisely configuring environmental variables. These models are intended for use in high-performance computing (HPC) machines rather than personal computers or laptops. This is primarily due to the parallel computing philosophy used in such models for computation and data access. Further, these models require computational power and massive storage capacity. We all know that laptops cannot support these features.
I’ve been working on the popular ESM/climate model known as the Community Earth Systems Model (CESM) on the HPC machine. It is a fully-coupled, global climate model that provides state-of-the-art computer simulations of the Earth’s past, present, and future climate states. This model has over 5 million lines of code and includes many sub-models such as the ocean, atmosphere, land, land ice, sea ice, Wave, Runoff, etc.
I came up with the idea of writing a blog about it to share my experience and explain the steps involved in building, configuring, porting, and running the CESM as a prototype on my personal laptop with Linux OS (Ubuntu 22.04), CPU: Intel i5–6300U, 4 computing cores, and 8 GB of RAM memory. Researchers in these fields can use these models in uncoupled simulations at coarser resolutions or in single-point experiments to understand how the model works before implementing their real-world experiments on HPC machines, as well as to gain a general understanding of the model physics.
This blog will walk you through configuring, porting, and testing the CESM on your personal laptop.
Model Source: https://www.cesm.ucar.edu/models/cesm2/?ref=hpb
These are the libraries and compilers required for CESM.