Tasks

Polaris currently supports tasks for two main components, Ocean component (MPAS-Ocean) and Sea ice component (MPAS-Seaice). Land-ice support is planned but has not yet been migrated. Tasks are grouped under these components and then into common categories for convenience and shared framework. These groupings of tasks have some common purpose or concept. For ocean, this includes “idealized” tasks like baroclinic channel and overflow.

Idealized tasks typically use analytic functions to define their topography, initial conditions and forcing data (i.e. boundary conditions), whereas realistic tasks most often use data files for all for these.

Polaris tasks are made up of one or more steps. These are the smallest units of work in polaris. You can run an individual step on its own if you like. Currently, the steps in a task run in sequence but there are plans to allow steps that don’t depend on one another to run in parallel in the future. Also, there is no requirement that all steps defined in a task must run when that task is run. Some steps may be disabled depending on config options (see Config Files) that you choose. Other steps, such as plotting or other forms of analysis, may be intended for you to run them manually if you want to see the plots.

In polaris, tasks are identified by their subdirectory relative to a base work directory that you choose during polaris setup. For example, the default task from the baroclinic channel configuration at 10-km resolution is identified as:

ocean/planar/baroclinic_channel/10km/default

When you list tasks:

polaris list

you will see these relative paths.