What is CIME?

Overview

CIME (Common Infrastructure for Modeling the Earth, pronounced “SEAM”) primarily consists of a Case Control System that supports the configuration, compilation, execution, system testing and unit testing of an Earth System Model. The three main components of the Case Control System are:

  1. XML files that describe the available machines, models and model configurations.

  2. Python scripts that take user commands and parse the XML files to configure a set of models with their build and runtime options for a specified machine and the provide additional commands to build executables and submit jobs.

  3. Testing utilities to run defined system tests and report results for different configurations of the coupled system.

CIME also contains additional stand-alone tools useful for Earth system modeling including:

  1. Parallel regridding weight generation program

  2. Scripts to automate off-line load-balancing.

  3. Scripts to conduct ensemble-based statistical consistency tests.

  4. Netcdf file comparison program (for bit-for-bit).

CIME does not contain the source code for any Earth System Model drivers or components. It is typically included alongside the source code of a host model. However, CIME does include pointers to external repositories that contain drivers, data models and other test components. These external components can be easily assembled to facilitate end-to-end system tests of the CIME infrastructure, which are defined in the CIME repository.

Development

CIME is developed in an open-source, public repository hosted under the Earth System Model Computational Infrastructure (ESMCI) organization on Github at http://github.com/ESMCI/cime.