Why High Performance Computing for Weather and Climate: ESiWACE Center of Excellence

Dr Mario Acosta

Title: Why High Performance Computing for Weather and Climate: ESiWACE Center of Excellence

The increase of the capability of Earth System Models is strongly linked to the amount of computing power and data storage capacity available. The scientific community requires increased model resolution, large numbers of experiments and ensembles to quantify uncertainty, increased complexity of ESMs, and longer simulation periods compared to the current state of climate models. For this reason, it is clear that there is a vital need for HPC in order to predict the evolution of the climate and answer key societal questions about the impact of global warming on human activities. With the purpose of addressing the gap between HPC adaptation and the scientific community, ESiWACE (Centre of Excellence in Simulation of Weather and Climate in Europe) was established. This initiative aims to accelerate the development of a new generation of high-resolution climate and weather models, supporting scientists on the path toward exascale computing. The ESiWACE3 Centre of Excellence (CoE) is the next (third) phase of the ESiWACE Centre of Excellence. As the ability to efficiently run Earth system models at ~1km resolution on EuroHPC supercomputers has already been established in previous phases for specific model configurations, and as developments are now being taken up by science-driven projects, this CoE focuses on supporting the community to reach a higher level of readiness for exascale supercomputing and knowledge transfer between the different Earth system modelling centres and teams across Europe. ESiWACE3 focuses on three main objectives that are essential to prepare existing operational weather and climate prediction systems for the exascale era, by (i) transferring and establishing knowledge and technologies for efficient and scalable weather and climate simulations across the Earth System Modelling community, (ii) filling common technology knowledge gaps and providing toolboxes for high resolution Earth System Modelling through collaborative developments, and (iii) serving as a sustainable community hub for training, communication and dissemination of high performance computing for weather and climate modelling in Europe. ESiWACE3 brings together the different approaches to these challenges from different modelling groups to transfer knowledge across the weather and climate domain, to create synergies between local efforts, to provide targeted support to modelling groups through tailored high performance computing services, and to provide training to educate the next generation of researchers.