ERF: Energy Research and Forecasting Model

Abstract High performance computing (HPC) architectures have undergone rapid development in recent years. As a result, established software suites face an ever increasing challenge to remain performant on and portable across modern systems. Many of the widely adopted atmospheric modeling codes cannot fully (or in some cases, at all) leverage the acceleration provided by General‐Purpose Graphics Processing Units, leaving users of those codes constrained to increasingly limited HPC resources. Energy Research and Forecasting (ERF) is a regional atmospheric modeling code that leverages the latest HPC architectures, whether composed of only Central Processing Units (CPUs) or incorporating GPUs. ERF contains many of the standard discretizations and basic features needed to model general atmospheric dynamics. The modular design of ERF provides a flexible platform for exploring different physics parameterizations and numerical strategies. ERF is built on a state‐of‐the‐art, well‐supported, software framework (AMReX) that provides a performance portable interface and ensures ERF's long‐term sustainability on next generation computing systems. This paper details the numerical methodology of ERF, presents results for a series of verification/validation cases, and documents ERF's performance on current HPC systems. The roughly 5× speed up of ERF (using GPUs) over Weather Research and Forecasting (CPUs only) for a 3D squall line test case highlights the significance of leveraging GPU acceleration.