github esmf-org/esmf v8.7.0
ESMF 8.7.0
on GitHub

14 hours ago

Overview

The 8.7.0 release of ESMF is backward compatible. Although there are some API changes to add more options for users, this release requires no user code changes. ESMF 8.7.0 introduces 16 feature enhancements and 6 bug fixes in various areas. Notably, ESMPy now has options to associate a node mask with an ESMPy Mesh and to utilize endFlag when finalizing ESMPy. Several improvements are made in time management such as ISO 8601 time interval format and repeat capabilities for ESMF Clocks. This release also includes performance enhancements such as to the routeHandle calculation. In addition, ESMF 8.7.0 includes more user options such as a new cubed sphere coordinate calculation method and new methods and documentation to facilitate the use of the new HConfig class in application code. To demonstrate the capability to couple components in languages other than Fortran, new NUOPC application prototypes were added to showcase basic C API support through ESMX and NUOPC. Finally, starting with this release, all pull requests into develop will be automatically tested using a combination of settings.

The ESMF team is grateful for the many years of support, ideation, feedback, testing, and code contributions that the ESMF user community has provided since its inception. We look forward to continuing this partnership with the community to further improve and add features to ESMF.

Release Notes

  • The public Fortran API in this release is backward compatible with the previous release of ESMF, 8.6.0, and patch release 8.6.1. There were some API changes, none of which require user code changes. The complete list of API changes is summarized in a table showing interface changes since ESMF 8.6.0. The table includes the rationale and impact for each change.
  • No bit-for-bit changes are expected for this release compared to ESMF 8.6.0 or 8.6.1.
  • No changes were made to the ESMF regrid weight generation methods and applications. The ESMF tables summarizing the ESMF regridding status are unchanged compared to ESMF 8.6.1.
  • All of the fixes and improvements released with patch 8.6.1 are included in release 8.7.0.
  • Starting with this release all pull requests into develop will be automatically tested using a combination of settings including: BOPT=O/g, COMPILER=gfortran/clang, COMM=mpiuni/mpich/openmpi, and TESTEXHAUSTIVE=ON/OFF. These tests can be manually executed on any fork/branch by going to Development Tests in the Actions tab on GitHub.
  • Added ESMF_StateLog(), ESMF_FieldLog(), ESMF_ArrayBundleLog(), ESMF_ArrayLog(), and ESMF_DistGridLog() methods. These methods allow inspection of ESMF objects from the user level, which can be useful during code development and debugging. ESMF object logging is also leveraged by the standard NUOPC Verbosity attributes of the generic NUOPC components.
  • Added ESMF_HConfigLog() and ESMF_HConfigMatch() methods to facilitate ESMF_HConfig object usage in application code. New sections with code examples were added to the reference manual discussing comparison of ESMF_HConfig objects, and usage of quoted strings and the Norway problem.
  • Added the capability to set an ESMF_TimeInterval object from a string in ISO 8601 time interval format. This allows a user familiar with that format to more intuitively set a time interval in ESMF.
  • Added a new repeat capability to the ESMF Clock. This capability can be enabled by setting the repeatDuration argument when creating a Clock. When enabled the clock stays within the range from the clock’s startTime to its startTime+repeatDuration. For example, when advancing if the current time goes past startTime+repeatDuration, then it loops back to startTime and continues from there. ESMF Alarms also work with this capability. One example of when this capability can be useful is when spinning up a model.
  • An enhancement was made to ESMPy to allow associating a node mask with an ESMPy Mesh. The Mesh.add_nodes method now accepts a keyword, node_mask, through which a user can pass a mask array of length n_nodes. Previously it was only possible to associate a mask with a mesh's elements.
  • Allow setting the endFlag when finalizing ESMPy. In particular, this allows the user to control whether the MPI library is finalized along with ESMPy or is still available afterwards.
  • Builds using mpiuni (the stub, single-processor MPI library bundled with ESMF) now support ESMF_PIO=internal, allowing full I/O with mpiuni. This is particularly useful for ESMPy.
  • The NUOPC Connection Options now support remapMethod “conserve_2nd” and extrapMethod “nearest_d”.
  • New NUOPC application prototypes were added to showcase basic C API support through ESMX and NUOPC. This approach leverages components in dynamically loaded objects.
  • A new NUOPC application prototype was added to demonstrate coupling a component written in Julia, with a cap in C.
  • A more scalable method of calculating cubed sphere coordinates was added. This method can be selected using the new coordCalcFlag argument added to the ESMF_GridCreateCubedSphere interfaces. Setting the argument to ESMF_CUBEDSPHERECALC_LOCAL selects the new method.
  • The routeHandle calculation was improved to be faster when mapping data locations to their eventual PET destinations. This improvement is expected to increase scalability, especially when redistributing data from a small number of PETs to a large number.
  • An internal data member in the ESMF_Array class, with a size that scales with the total number of PETs (i.e. MPI tasks) across which the Array was created, has been eliminated. This improvement dramatically reduces the memory requirement for applications that have a large number of Arrays or Fields and run on large numbers of PETs.
  • During ‘make install’ the FindESMF.cmake file is copied into the ESMF_INSTALL_PREFIX/cmake directory. The default location can be overwritten by setting an environment variable, ESMF_INSTALL_CMAKEDIR. This variable can be specified as an absolute path (starting with "/") or relative to ESMF_INSTALL_PREFIX.
  • The ESMF capability to access components through dynamically loaded objects was made more portable by introducing wildcard support for the suffix of specified shared objects.

Bug Fixes:

  • A fix was made in ESMPy to permit the creation of Grids where the product of the dimensions exceeds approximately 268,000,000.
  • The build of libesmftrace_preload.dylib on some Darwin (Mac) systems with OpenMPI has been fixed. (Incorrect link flags were being used in this build.)
  • A fix was made to ESMPy to allow the creation of 3D Meshes. Previously creating a 3D Mesh in ESMPy would result in an error.
  • The regridding system was fixed so that the patch regrid method (ESMF_REGRIDMETHOD_PATCH) can be used on a source Field built on a Mesh where the PET list of the component that contains the destination Field has some PETs that aren’t in the source Field’s component’s PET list. Previously this condition would have resulted in an error.
  • A fix was made to ESMX to add link_module_paths to the CMAKE_MODULE_PATH list.
  • A fix was made to ESMX to support using variables that are defined by setting link_packages in esmxBuild.yaml files.

Known Issues

Platform-specific issues:

  • Compiling ESMF with GCC version 8.1.0 triggers an internal compiler error in ESMF_HConfig.F90 due to the use of allocatable character variables. Earlier and later versions of GCC do not have this issue.
  • On Darwin, with version 15 of the clang C compiler, when building under Rosetta, it is sometimes necessary to add "-Wl,-ld_classic" to environment variables ESMF_CXXLINKOPTS, ESMF_CLINKOPTS, and ESMF_F90LINKOPTS to work around link errors. (For more details, see the related GitHub issue.)
  • The cray (cce) compiler currently has problems running PIO with mpiuni, at least for some versions of this compiler (tested with version 15.0.1).

Documentation

Tables

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