ESiWACE2

The path towards exascale computing holds enormous challenges for the community of weather and climate modelling regarding portability, scalability and data management that can hardly be faced by individual institutes. ESiWACE2 will therefore link, organise and enhance Europe’s excellence in weather and climate modelling to (1) enable leading European weather and climate models to leverage the performance of pre-exascale systems with regard to both compute and data capacity as soon as possible and (2) prepare the weather and climate community to be able to make use of exascale systems when they become available.

To achieve these goals, ESiWACE2 will:

(a) improve throughput and scalability of leading European weather and climate models and demonstrate the technical and scientific performance of the models in unprecedented resolution on pre-exascale EuroHPC systems,

(b) evaluate and establish new technologies such as domain-specific languages (DSLs) and machine learning for use in weather and climate modelling,

(c) enhance HPC capacity via services to the weather and climate community to optimize code performance and allow model porting,

(d) improve the data management toolchain from weather and climate simulations at scale,

(e) foster co-design between model developers, HPC manufacturers and HPC centres, and

(f) strengthen interactions of the community with the European HPC Eco-system.

ESiWACE2 will deliver configurations of leading models that can make efficient use of the largest supercomputers in Europe and run at unprecedented resolution for high-quality weather and climate predictions. This will be a beacon for the community in Europe and around the world. ESiWACE2 will develop HPC benchmarks, increase flexibility to use heterogeneous hardware, and provide targeted education and training for one of the most challenging applications to shape the future of HPC in Europe.

Within ESiWACE2, the Netherlands eScience Center is responsible for setting up a call for service projects.

The goal of the services is to create collaborations that provide guidance, engineering, and advice to support exascale preparations for weather and climate models. All groups developing and maintaining weather and climate codes – not only the ESiWACE2 partners – can apply. Proposals for such collaboration projects will be peer-reviewed and when found eligible will be granted in-kind support by one of the partners involved.

The service projects represent the outward engagement of the ESiWACE2 with the Earth system modelling communities in Europe. Weather and climate models are large and complex applications that experience a tension field between investments to enhance certain features, for example increasing fidelity, spatiotemporal resolutions, or resolving more physical processes, and investments to adapt the software to the latest hardware architectures. The way forward in preparing weather and climate simulations for exascale is to involve the community in making better use of the collective resources, utilising components developed elsewhere. The services do exactly that, they bring together experts in different fields to create real impact in Earth system models.

Project website:
https://www.esiwace.eu/events-news/news/esiwace2-s…

The project ESiWACE2 has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement 823988.