A new version of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model, or E3SM, is two times faster than an earlier version released in 2018.

Earth system models have weather-scale resolution and use advanced computers to simulate aspects of Earth’s variability and anticipate decadal changes that will critically impact the U.S. energy sector in coming years.

Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are part of the team that developed version 2 of the model — E3SMv2 — which was released to the scientific community in September 2021.  

“E3SMv2 delivered twice the performance over E3SMv1 when using identical computational resources,” said ORNL computational scientist Sarat Sreepathi, who co-leads the E3SM Performance Group. “This is a significant achievement as the performance boost is reflected while running the fully integrated Earth system model and not just confined to smaller model components.”