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The Earth System Modeling Framework's core implementation
team will welcome participants to the third ESMF community meeting,
which will be held at NCAR on 15 July 2004.
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N CAR will host
the third Earth System Modeling Framework (ESMF) community meeting at
the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder on 15 July 2004. The ESMF team will highlight
the new capabilities of ESMF Version 2.0, scheduled for release in June.
Announcement
and registration information
The ESMF project is a national-scale collaboration to build a software
infrastructure that allows different weather, climate, and data-assimilation
components to operate together on parallel supercomputers. The framework
increases cross-disciplinary communication, making it possible for
scientists and software developers, weather forecasters and climate
modelers to share software more easily, port codes to a variety of
computing platforms, and re-use common code in a variety of applications.
"At this point, the ESMF is the premier national project in
developing a common modeling infrastructure — and NCAR is at the
core of this effort," says Cecelia DeLuca, manager of the core
implementation team, which is based in NCAR's Scientific Computing
Division (SCD). "It reflects SCD's position as a leader in this
area, which requires a blending of computational and scientific expertise.
It's a very exciting position to be in and we've got a great responsibility
to the community to succeed."
Meeting agenda
The 15 July meeting will be an opportunity for the ESMF team to talk
to scientists, program managers, software developers, vendors, and
others involved in Earth system modeling about the state of the project,
current capabilities of the software, and plans for the future.
"We'll present ESMF Version 2.0, which is much improved over
the prototype we released at the meeting last summer," Cecelia
says. "We'll discuss what the software can do and give a tutorial
on what it takes for users to adopt their code to the framework. We'll
also talk about the groups who have already started to use ESMF and
report on some of the demonstration experiments we've done coupling
models from different institutions."
These experiments have involved:
- The Community Atmosphere Model, or CAM (the atmospheric component
of NCAR's Community Climate System Model)
- The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's General Circulation
Model (MITgcm)
- Several modeling systems from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (NOAA/GFDL)
- A data-assimilation system from the National Centers for Environmental
Prediction (NCEP)
"We'll show ESMF at work in real modeling codes," Cecelia
explains. "We've used ESMF both for its general-purpose utilities
— for instance, time management, logging, and error handling —
and its coupling software, which takes data coming out of one model
and puts it into another. We've created a number of demonstration applications
based on model couplings that had never been done before. So we'll
talk about how those experiments have gone."
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At the July 15 community meeting, the ESMF team will talk
about interoperability experiments. These plots are from an experiment
that coupled the MITgcm ocean model to the NCAR Community Atmosphere
Model. More
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Also on the agenda for July's meeting will be the vision the ESMF
team has for future development of the software infrastructure and
how that merges with the needs of the broader geosciences community.
"We've talked with a wide group of contributors about what we
call the 'ESMF environment,' which will back up the ESMF with a relational
database containing model experiments, links to model data, and tools
for automatically assembling components into applications," Cecelia
says. "What we'd like to do is move toward is a more complete
modeling environment. There's a paper called 'Future
Directions for the Earth System Modeling Framework' available on
our website that lays out the vision clearly."
The July meeting will be the project's third annual community meeting.
The first meeting in Washington D.C. drew 80 participants, and 120
participants attended the second meeting last summer at Princeton University.
For more information on July's community meeting, contact Jennifer
Delauren (delauran@ucar.edu).
Core team and collaborators
Cecelia manages the ESMF implementation team under the supervision
of principal investigator Tim Killeen, director of NCAR. The team is
a tightly-knit group of six SCD staff who are creating and testing
the framework. Core developers are Nancy Collins, Chuck Panaccione,
Earl Schwab, and Jon Wolfe, who are working on utilities as well as
coupling and regridding software. Silverio Vasquez performs testing,
while Robbie Staufer serves as administrator and database developer.
"We're working closely with a few external developers too,"
Cecelia adds. "Gerhard Theurich of NASA/Goddard is developing
our communications libraries, and his colleague Spenser Swift is working
on our I/O."
The team actively collaborates with five agencies — the National
Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy,
NASA, and NOAA — and a number of universities, including the University
of California-Los Angeles, the University of Michigan, and MIT.
"All told, we're working with 40 people as application developers
or actual framework developers," Cecelia says. "It's turning
into an extensive effort, with people all over the world."
The importance of a common modeling infrastructure
The NCAR Strategic Plan, the NCAR Strategic Plan for High-Performance
Simulation, and the SCD Strategic Plan all mention a common modeling
infrastructure as a necessary element to address the complex problems
of this century — as do countless national and international reports.
Not surprisingly, therefore, ESMF has been generating interest from
groups working on a wide range of problems ranging from forecasting
and climate prediction to battlespace simulation and emergency response.
As Cecelia says, "Any modeling system that's comprised of Earth
system modeling components may well be within our domain."
By helping scientists and engineers use common software to solve
routine computational problems, ESMF will ultimately result in better
research and accelerated progress in simulating the Earth's weather
and climate systems.
For more information
Third ESMF community meeting:
ESMF project:
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