The timing utility code in cesm1_2_2 and earlier (not sure how far back this goes) has a bug in perf_mod.F90 which results in no output being produced when the global statistics are turned off (via setting the namelist variable profile_global_stats=.false.). The fix is to change the value of the parameter def_perf_outpe_num from 0 to -1. It is also possible to work around this without modifying code by setting the namelist variable profile_outpe_num=-1. This value is used to enable the default behavior which is that all tasks write timing information to an output file.