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@ARTICLE{Schlund:1050041,
author = {Schlund, Manuel and Andela, Bouwe and Benke, Jörg and
Comer, Ruth and Hassler, Birgit and Hogan, Emma and
Kalverla, Peter and Lauer, Axel and Little, Bill and
Loosveldt Tomas, Saskia and Nattino, Francesco and Peglar,
Patrick and Predoi, Valeriu and Smeets, Stef and Worsley,
Stephen and Yeo, Martin and Zimmermann, Klaus},
title = {{A}dvanced climate model evaluation with {ESMV}al{T}ool
v2.11.0 using parallel, out-of-core, and distributed
computing},
journal = {Geoscientific model development},
volume = {18},
number = {13},
issn = {1991-959X},
address = {Katlenburg-Lindau},
publisher = {Copernicus},
reportid = {FZJ-2025-05755},
pages = {4009 - 4021},
year = {2025},
abstract = {Earth system models (ESMs) allow numerical simulations of
the Earth's climate system. Driven by the need to better
understand climate change and its impacts, these models have
become increasingly sophisticated over time, generating vast
amounts of data. To effectively evaluate the complex
state-of-the-art ESMs and ensure their reliability, new
tools for comprehensive analysis are essential. The
open-source community-driven Earth System Model Evaluation
Tool (ESMValTool) addresses this critical need by providing
a software package for scientists to assess the performance
of ESMs using common diagnostics and metrics. In this paper,
we describe recent significant improvements of ESMValTool's
computational efficiency, which allow a more effective
evaluation of these complex ESMs and also high-resolution
models. These optimizations include parallel computing
(execute multiple computation tasks simultaneously),
out-of-core computing (process data larger than available
memory), and distributed computing (spread computation tasks
across multiple interconnected nodes or machines). When
comparing the latest ESMValTool version with a previous not
yet optimized version, we find significant performance
improvements for many relevant applications running on a
single node of a high-performance computing (HPC) system,
ranging from 2.3 times faster runs in a multi-model setup up
to 23 times faster runs for processing a single
high-resolution model. By utilizing distributed computing on
two nodes of an HPC system, these speedup factors can be
further improved to 3.0 and 44, respectively. Moreover,
evaluation runs with the latest version of ESMValTool also
require significantly less computational resources than
before, which in turn reduces power consumption and thus the
overall carbon footprint of ESMValTool runs. For example,
the previously mentioned use cases use 2.3 (multi-model
evaluation) and 23 (high-resolution model evaluation) times
less resources compared to the reference version on one HPC
node. Finally, analyses which could previously only be
performed on machines with large amounts of memory can now
be conducted on much smaller hardware through the use of
out-of-core computation. For instance, the high-resolution
single-model evaluation use case can now be run with 8 GB
of available memory despite an input data size of 35 GB,
which was not possible with earlier versions of ESMValTool.
This enables running much more complex evaluation tasks on a
personal laptop than before.},
cin = {JSC},
ddc = {550},
cid = {I:(DE-Juel1)JSC-20090406},
pnm = {5111 - Domain-Specific Simulation $\&$ Data Life Cycle Labs
(SDLs) and Research Groups (POF4-511) / 2A5 - Exascale Earth
System Modeling (CARF - CCA) (POF4-2A5) / USMILE -
Understanding and Modelling the Earth System with Machine
Learning (855187) / ESM2025 - Earth system models for the
future (101003536) / IS-ENES3 - Infrastructure for the
European Network for Earth System modelling - Phase 3
(824084) / EUCP - European Climate Prediction system
(776613) / ESiWACE3 - Center of excellence for weather and
climate phase 3 (101093054)},
pid = {G:(DE-HGF)POF4-5111 / G:(DE-HGF)POF4-2A5 /
G:(EU-Grant)855187 / G:(EU-Grant)101003536 /
G:(EU-Grant)824084 / G:(EU-Grant)776613 /
G:(EU-Grant)101093054},
typ = {PUB:(DE-HGF)16},
doi = {10.5194/gmd-18-4009-2025},
url = {https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/1050041},
}