DoD BEI Work Plan

Milestones

There are two types of milestones under the The Battlespace Environments Institute (BEI) award. The following is an excerpt from the ESMF/BEI milestone agreement.

First, ESMF must add one new, major capability required by BEI applications per year. This reflects the primary development goal for ESMF articulated in the BEI Strategic Plan. The following are major capabilities of interest to BEI that ESMF currently lacks:

• Support for a fully-featured suite of two-dimensional regridding methods, including merging and masking, and a variety of regridding options including 2nd order conservative and bicubic.
• Support for representing, partitioning, communicating with, and regridding unstructured grids and two or more semi-structured grids, such as displaced pole, tripolar, and icosahedral grids.
• Support for advanced I/O, including I/O support for both logically rectangular, semi-structured, and unstructured grids, asynchronous I/O, checkpoint/restart, and at least two archival mechanisms (e.g. NetCDF, HDF5, binary, etc.).
• Support for a multiple executable or Grid-enabled version of ESMF, which may be achieved by bringing ESMF components into a run-time environment such as CCA or PRISM.
• Advanced support for data assimilation systems, including data structures for observational data and adjoints for ESMF methods.
• Support for nested, moving grids and possibly adaptive grids - this item may include a paradigm for nesting models within models, consistent with the ESMF grid nesting implementation.
• Support for fully three-dimensional regridding.
• Advanced optimization and load balancing.

It is important to retain some flexibility in the order in which these capabilities will be delivered; ESMF's priorities depend upon the priorities set by modelers, and at this stage of BEI these are not fully defined.

Second, ESMF development must progress at a pace that enables BEI applications to meet goals articulated in the BEI Strategic Plan.