Extreme weather events and climate change are two of the main threats for society of the 21st century. Extreme weather events caused over 500 thousand casualties and over 2 trillion USD economic damages in the past 20 years. A failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation targets is ranked among the leading threats to global society. At the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, leaders from 194 countries of the world unanimously acknowledged the serious threat posed by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. Society must now become resilient to changes in climate over coming decades, which requires making quantitative estimates for future changes of weather patterns and climate extremes. This includes exceptional weather events such as violent windstorms and flash floods, but also persistent anomalies in planetary-scale circulation patterns, which lead to pervasive flooding in some regions and seasons, and long-lived drought and extremes of heat in others. Numerical models of the Earth system represent the most important tool to anticipate and assess these kinds of threats. One of the main factors that is limiting the skill of these models is limited resolution, and resolution, in turn, is limited by computational power that can be leveraged by these models.
The first two phases of the ESiWACE Centre of Excellence (COE) have pushed the resolution of global Earth system models to unprecedented levels. This includes the first global atmosphere models that were able to run at ~1 km resolution in the first phase of ESiWACE and coupled atmosphere/ocean models that were able to run at a resolution of a couple of kilometres in “production mode” with full model output and a throughput of at least one Simulated Year per Day (SYPD) that allows for operational predictions of weather and climate. Furthermore, community tools for coupling, data handling, and visualisation have been enabled to work at this level of resolution and throughput. These high-resolution model configurations are now taken over by the scientific community to perform research simulations (for example in the NextGEMs or WarmWorld projects) and to prepare the model configurations for operational weather and climate predictions (for example in the Destination Earth project).
This proposal suggests the next (third) phase of the ESiWACE COE. As the ability to run Earth system models at ~1 km resolution efficiently on EuroHPC supercomputers has already been established in previous phases for specific model configurations, and as developments are now picked up by science-driven projects, this proposal will adjust our focus to support the weather and climate modelling community to reach a higher readiness level regarding exascale supercomputing and foster knowledge transfer between the different Earth system modelling centres and teams across Europe.
48 months from 01/01/2023 to 31/12/2026
https://www.esiwace.eu/
General aims
General objectives
The project will focus on three main aims that are essential to prepare existing, operational weather and climate prediction systems for the exascale era through (i) the transfer and establishment of knowledge and technology for efficient and scalable simulations of weather and climate across the Earth system modelling community, (ii) closing common technology knowledge gaps and by providing toolboxes for high-resolution Earth system modelling via joint developments and (iii) by serving as a sustainable community hub for training, communication and dissemination for high-performance computing for weather and climate modelling in Europe. ESiWACE3 will bring the various approaches to address these challenges from the different modelling groups together to transfer knowledge across the weather and climate domain, to generate synergies between the local efforts, to provide targeted support of modelling groups via customised high-performance computing services, and to provide training to educate the next generation of researchers.
CMCC role
CMCC will co-lead WP2 – Developing community tools with focus on the development of community tools. Specifically, CMCC will be involved in Task 2.2: Portability tools.
CMCC will also be involved in the following work packages by participating in specific tasks:
- Work package WP3 – Tackling the data challenge
Specifically, CMCC will participate in:
Task 3.2: An online laboratory for data compression
Task 3.3: FAIR Digital Objects and innovative HPDA solutions for enhanced analysis capacity and reproducibility
- Work package WP6 – Community engagement, dissemination and exploitation
Specifically, CMCC will participate in:
Task 6.1 Communication and CDEP
Task 6.3 Community engagement
Task 6.5 Exploitation and sustainability of project results
- Work package WP7 – Project Management
Specifically, CMCC will participate in:
Task 7.3 Data management
CMCC contribution to the project is summarized as follows:
- Deployment of PSyclone DSL into NEMO ocean model; evaluation of computational performance and ability of PSyclone to efficiently produce a NEMO version which can exploit GPU-based architectures.
- Defining innovative HPDA solutions for enhanced analysis capacity and reproducibility.
- Organization of a HPC Workshop.
- Dissemination activity.
Activities
The work plan of the project is arranged in 7 work packages:
- WP1 – Support to effective applications
- WP2 – Developing community tools
- WP3 – Tackling the data challenge
- WP4 – HPC Services to enhance Weather and Climate applications
- WP5 – Training and capacity building
- WP6 – Community engagement, dissemination and exploitation
- WP7 – Project Management
Expected results
ESiWACE3, the third phase of ESiWACE, will work towards three top-level aims:
- Transferring and establishing knowledge and technology for efficient and scalable simulations of weather and climate across the Earth system modelling community in Europe.
- Closing common technology gaps in the knowledge and toolbox for high-resolution Earth system modelling via joint developments across the European community.
- Serving as a sustainable community hub for training, communication, and dissemination for high-performance computing for weather and climate modelling in Europe.
Partners
- STICHTING NETHERLANDS ESCIENCE CENTER (NLESC) – The Netherlands
- DEUTSCHES KLIMARECHENZENTRUM GMBH (DKRZ) – Germany
- HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO (UH) – Finland
- EUROPEAN CENTRE FOR MEDIUM-RANGE WEATHER FORECASTS– (ECMWF) – UK
- SVERIGES METEOROLOGISKA OCH HYDROLOGISKA INSTITUT (SMHI) – Sweden
- CSC-TIETEEN TIETOTEKNIIKAN KESKUS OY (CSC) – Finland
- MAX-PLANCK-GESELLSCHAFT ZUR FORDERUNG DER WISSENSCHAFTEN EV (MPI-M) – Germany
- FONDAZIONE CENTRO EURO-MEDITERRANEO SUI CAMBIAMENTI CLIMATICI (CMCC) – Italy
- LATEST THINKING GMBH (LT) – Germany
- BULL SAS (ATOS) – France
- FORSCHUNGSZENTRUM JULICH GMBH (JSC) – Germany