The ModelE source code is quite portable and can be installed and used basically on any Unix machine with enough CPU power and memory (from Linux clusters to Linux and Mac OS X desktops). Though one can run the basic serial version of the model with prescribed ocean on a single core with as little as 2 GB of memory, to do any useful simulations in reasonable time one would need a computer with at least 16 cores (Sandy Bridge or faster) with at least 1 GB of memory per core. To do dynamic ocean simulations with full atmospheric chemistry one typically would need 88 cores with at least 1 GB of memory per core.
The source code is written mostly in Fortran 90 language with some
elements of Fortran 2003 and can be compiled either with Intel ifort
compiler (version 12.0) or with GNU gfortran (version 4.9 or later).
For input/output we use a NetCDF library, so it has to be installed (version 3.6 or later).
For parallel simulations on multiple cores the model needs to be compiled with MPI support, so an MPI library needs to be installed on your computer. The following MPI distributions are currently supported by the model:
For desktops or small servers we would recommend OpenMPI, since it is the easiest one to install and configure, though MPICH2 also works without problems. On a cluster, typically it would be up to support group to make a decision on which MPI distribution is more suitable for a particular platform. Over the last few years we were using Intel MPI with great success.
The compilation process is based on GNU make command and uses perl
scripting language and m4 preprocessor (GNU version). Typically these
are present by default on any Linux or Mac OS X system, but if you are
using other type on Unix you may need to install them.
If instead of latitude-longitude version of the model you want to work with cubed sphere version, then in addition to the requirements mentioned above you will need to install a compatible ESMF library. You will also need to obtain the source code for the cubed sphere dynamical core from the developers since it is not included in the standard modelE distribution.