Containers 2: Status of containerisation of Earth Science Models - Milestone MS5

The ESiWACE2 project has put a large effort into utilising containers for production Earth Science models without major impact on performance. During the ESiWACE2 container hackathon (Dec. 3-5, 2019, extensively documented in deliverable D2.8), six different Earth System models were prepared in containers. In Milestone M2.4 (MS4) ETH/CSCS recounted its experiences with the containerisation of the Icosahedral Non-hydrostatic (ICON) model running at scale. In the latter stages of the ESiWACE2 project, teams from Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), ETH Zurich (ETHZ), MeteoSwiss and the University of Reading implemented a container infrastructure within the production workflows. This milestone summarises these containerisation efforts, which will subsequently be presented in more detail in Deliverable D2.9 Report summarising porting the different models to containers, including evaluation of the performance on the supercomputer where the containers are deployed. Three production models were foreseen for this milestone. However, these teams containerised four: EC-Earth (BSC), COSMO (ETH Zurich and MeteoSwiss), ICON (ETH Zurich) and LFRic (UReading). The status of each of these is given in the subsequent sections