Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Publication Date
8 September 2022

Introduction to EAMxx and its Superior GPU Performance

Image
Precipitation averaged over the last 30 days of an EAMxx simulation (left) and corresponding EAMf90 simulation (right). Both simulations use grid spacing of 28 km.
Description

Over the past four years, E3SM has built a new global nonhydrostatic atmosphere model aimed at superior performance on the upcoming hybrid architectures of DOE’s Leadership Computing Facilities (LCFs) like ThetaSummit, Frontier, and Aurora (Bertagna et al., 2020, Taylor et al., 2020). The E3SM Atmosphere Model in C++ (EAMxx) is written in C++ using the Kokkos library to run efficiently on CPUs, GPUs, and (hopefully) whatever architectures come next. This effort was originally focused on very high resolution and was known as the Simple Cloud-Resolving E3SM Atmosphere Model (SCREAM).

Because this model is now being extended to work at conventional resolutions, EAMxx is a more fitting name. The name SCREAM will continue to be used to refer to cloud-resolving configurations of the EAMxx code. This article reports on the first simulations with EAMxx, which were performed over the last few months. Because low-resolution extensions to EAMxx (e.g., deep convection and gravity wave drag parameterizations) are not available yet, all simulations reported below use the SCREAM configuration.

Read the full blog by Peter Caldwell of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Funding Program Area(s)