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Installation

Our journey starts with cloning the project that manages IPSL-CM-LAM models, coupled model configurations and experiments, called MODIPSL.

At first, the terminology of MODIPSL might be confusing, because there is a lot of talking about models, configurations, experiments, coupled models etc. Let's take a minute to clarify what MODIPSL deals with.

The main goal of MODIPSL is to work on coupled models, i.e. combined physical, dynamical, and I/O components that can work together. For example, ICOLMDZ coupled model combines dynamics of DYNAMICO with physics of LMDZ. Usually, it is augmented with XIOS for robust and parallel I/O handling. If you add NEMO for ocean physics, or INCA for atmospheric chemistry, you will obtain another coupled model.

Once you have a coupled model, you need to configure it somehow. This is where we talk about (coupled) model configuration which consists of fixed components versions. On top of that, we talk about experiment configurations which dictate the conditions of simulations. They are usually defined using *.card, *.def, *.driver, and *.xml files.

Note

Versioning of models, their configurations, and experiments is compilcated. The easiest solution is to pay attention to the revision of MODIPSL, because specific revision of MODIPSL holds fixed versions of model components, their configurations, and available experiments.

Getting MODIPSL

svn co https://forge.ipsl.fr/igcmg/svn/modipsl/trunk modipsl #(1)!
  1. Type svn --version to see if Subversion is available. On IDRIS/JeanZay, run module load svn to load it.

Tip

In order to increase reproducibility of your experiments, work on specific revision of modipsl. You can clone a selected revision with svn co -r <REVISION>. By doing so, you make sure that the version of models and experiments is the same for you and other users.

This project serves various tasks:

  1. Downloading models with their configuration (e.g. DYNAMICO, LMDZ)
  2. Compiling coupled models into one executable
  3. Downloading experiment configurations
  4. Running experiments.

In the subsequent sections, we will talk about first two tasks.

Structure of MODIPSL

MODIPSL has a fixed structure with subsequent important folders:

  • bin/ - will contain compiled coupled model
  • config/ - will contain configurations of the coupled model and exeriments
  • modeles/ - will contain downloaded models (e.g. DYNAMICO, LMDZ)
  • util/ - contains utility scripts

Downloading model

In the util/ directory, you can find two important files: - mod.def - definition of coupled configurations models and

Compiling model