A new Earth System Modeling project, Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME), has recently launched and made available its Project Strategy and Initial Implementation Plan. ACME is an unprecedented collaboration among eight national laboratories, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, four academic institutions, and one private-sector company to develop and apply the most complete, leading-edge climate and Earth system models to the most challenging and demanding climate-change research imperatives. It is the only major national modeling project designed to address U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) mission needs and efficiently utilize DOE leadership computing resources now and in the future.

This project plan articulates a strategy for achieving a very small number of high-impact scientific deliverables enabled by computing at extreme scale in the near-term—3 years—and in the longer term—10 years. It will be updated periodically in response to and in anticipation of these changes, with the first update occurring in approximately 6 months.