CliMA collaboration aims to reinvent Earth system modeling

From the article:

“We agreed to start from scratch rather than building upon existing climate models, some of which dated back to the 1960s and ’70s,” Ferrari says. “To do something really new, we had to engage the computer science community,” capitalizing on advances in programming languages, computer architectures, and artificial intelligence techniques.

The team has also brought new science into its models, working to incorporate small-scale climate features and processes that most predecessors could not accurately represent. “Large-scale and small-scale processes are always interacting” in the oceans and atmosphere, Ferrari explains, which is why small-scale turbulent processes are crucial to the new model. “Everyone involved in CliMA agrees that they contribute to the greatest uncertainties in projections.”

[...]

[T]he project elected to use Julia, a dynamic programming language invented at MIT that’s designed for scientific computing. “It was a bold choice,” admits Valentin Churavy SM ’19, a CliMA team member and doctoral student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, “because Julia hadn’t been used on such a big science project before. But the language part of this effort has worked out well.”

Ferrari agrees. “The Julia gamble has really paid off.” The majority of existing climate models run on Fortran, a programming language created in the late 1950s that is unfamiliar to most people under 30. “I’m glad I can finally stop using my grandfather’s programming language,” says Ali Ramadhan, an EAPS doctoral student on the CliMA team.

The code is on Github. There's an article about Julia in Linux Weekly News.