The optimization opportunities of a codebase are not completely exploited by compilers. In fact, there are optimizations that must be done within the source code. Hence, if the code developers skip some details, some performance is lost. Thus, the use of a general-purpose language to develop a performance-demanding software-e.g. climate models-needs more care from the developers. They should take into account hardware details of the target machine. Besides, writing a high-performance code for one machine will have a lower performance on another one. The developers usually write multiple optimized sections or even code versions for the different target machines. Such codes are complex and hard to maintain. In this article we introduce a higher-level code development approach, where we develop a set of extensions to the language that is used to write a model's code. Our extensions form a domainspecific language (DSL) that abstracts domain concepts and leaves the lower level details to a configurable source-to-source translation process. The purpose of the developed extensions is to support the icosahedral climate/atmospheric model development. We have started with the three icosahedral models: DYNAMICO, ICON, and NICAM. The collaboration with the scientists from the weather/climate sciences enabled agreedupon extensions. When we have suggested an extension we kept in mind that it represents a higher-level domain-based concept, and that it carries no lower-level details. The introduced DSL (GGDML-General Grid Definition and Manipulation Language) hides optimization details like memory layout. It reduces code size of a model to less than one third its original size in terms of lines of code. The development costs of a model with GGDML are therefore reduced significantly.

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Dealing with extreme scale earth system models is challenging from the computer science perspective, as the required computing power and storage capacity are steadily increasing. Scientists perform runs with growing resolution or aggregate results from many similar smaller-scale runs with slightly different initial conditions (the so-called ensemble runs). In the fifth Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5), the produced datasets require more than three Petabytes of storage and the compute and storage requirements are increasing significantly for CMIP6. Climate scientists across the globe are developing next-generation models based on improved numerical formulation leading to grids that are discretized in alternative forms such as an icosahedral (geodesic) grid. The developers of these models face similar problems in scaling, maintaining and optimizing code. Performance portability and the maintainability of code are key concerns of scientists as, compared to industry projects, model code is continuously revised and extended to incorporate further levels of detail. This leads to a rapidly growing code base that is rarely refactored. However, code modernization is important to maintain productivity

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The increasing need for performance of earth system modeling and other scientific domains pushes the computing technologies in diverse architectural directions. The development of models needs technical expertise and skills of using tools that are able to exploit the hardware capabilities. The heterogeneity of architectures complicates the development and the maintainability of the models. To improve the software development process of earth system models, we provide an approach that simplifies the code maintainability by fostering separation of concerns while providing performance portability. We propose the use of high-level language extensions that reflect scientific concepts. The scientists can use the programming language of their own choice to develop models, however, they can use the language extensions optionally wherever they need. The code translation is driven by configurations that are separated from the model source code. These configurations are prepared by scientific programmers to optimally use the machine's features. The main contribution of this paper is the demonstration of a usercontrolled source-to-source translation technique of earth system models that are written with higher-level semantics. We discuss a flexible code translation technique that is driven by the users through a configuration input that is prepared especially to transform the code, and we use this technique to produce OpenMP or OpenACC enabled codes besides MPI to support multi-node configurations.