Introduction to E3SM-Unified

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What is E3SM-Unified?

E3SM-Unified is a curated analysis environment for the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM). It packages the tools most commonly used for analysis, diagnostics, visualization, and data transformation into a single install that can be used locally or deployed on shared HPC systems.

The core product is the e3sm-unified conda package. On laptops and workstations, users typically install that package directly from conda-forge. On supported HPC systems, maintainers deploy Pixi environments and optional Spack-backed system-library views with mache deploy, then publish load scripts for users.

Key Features

  • Combines analysis, diagnostics, and workflow tools into one install.

  • Supports multiple package variants, including nompi, mpich, openmpi, and hpc.

  • Uses machine-aware deployment on supported HPC systems through mache.

  • Is fully open source and maintained in GitHub.

Common Use Cases

  • Diagnostics and evaluation (e.g., e3sm_diags, MPAS-Analysis)

  • CMIP output conversion (e3sm_to_cmip)

  • Time series generation, viewer creation, and archiving (zppy, zstash)

  • Domain generation and mesh visualization (cime_gen_domain, mosaic)

Supported Platforms

E3SM-Unified is available on many E3SM-supported systems:

  • Andes

  • Anvil

  • Chrysalis

  • Compy

  • Dane

  • Frontier

  • Perlmutter

  • Polaris (ALCF)

  • Ruby

It can also be installed on Linux or macOS laptops for limited use (see Quickstart Guide). Windows is not supported.

How the Deployment Model Works

There are two common ways to use E3SM-Unified:

  • Install e3sm-unified directly from conda-forge on a personal system.

  • Source a maintainer-provided load script on a supported HPC machine.

HPC deployments can use a dual-layout setup, where login nodes use a lighter Pixi environment and compute nodes switch to an MPI-capable environment with system libraries provided through Spack. This lets the same load script work well on both login and compute nodes.

Getting Help