ESiWACE leverages two established European networks, namely (1) the European Network for Earth System modelling, representing the European climate modelling community and (2) the world leading European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. The governance structure that defines the services to be provided will be driven by the European weather and climate science community.
Weather and climate computing have always been one of the key drivers for HPC development, with domain specific scientific and technical requirements that stretch the capability and capacity of existing software and hardware to the limits. By developing solutions for Europe and at European scale, ESiWACE will directly impact on the competitiveness of the European HPC industry by engendering new products, providing opportunities for exploitation beyond the project itself, and by enhancing the skills base of staff in both industry and academia.
Project goals
ESiWACE will substantially improve efficiency and productivity of numerical weather and climate simulation on high-performance computing platforms by supporting the end-to-end workflow of global Earth system modelling in HPC environment. This will be obtained by improving and supporting:
- Scalability of models, tools and data management on state-of-the-art supercomputer systems
- Usability of models and tools throughout the European HPC eco-system
- Exploitability of the huge amount of resulting data.
ESiWACE will develop solutions for cross-cutting HPC challenges particular to the weather and climate domain. This will range from the development of specific software products to the deployment of user facing services for both, computing and storage.
ESiWACE will be at once thematic, as it focuses on the HPC application domain of climate and weather modeling, transversal, as it covers several aspects of computational science, and challenge-driven, as climate and weather predictability represents a major societal issue.
Besides, with regard to the upcoming exascale era, ESiWACE will establish demonstrator simulations, which will be run at highest affordable resolutions (target 1km). This will yield insights into the computability of configurations that will be sufficient to address key scientific challenges in weather and climate prediction.
Role of SMHI
SMHI is leading the task “Support, training and integration of state-of-the-art community models and tools” which fosters improved user support, enhanced training, and faster integration of existing community models and tools, leading to enforced user-driven evolution of the community software. Within this task we are responsible for the EC-Earth model, facilitating community wide access, use of the model’s latest versions and diffusion of best practice.
SMHI is also part of the task “Global high-resolution model demonstrators” with the fully coupled atmosphere-ocean version of EC-Earth (OpenIFS, NEMO and OASIS coupler) at a 10 km resolution. We are responsible for the integration of OpenIFS into EC-Earth in this task.
Project partners
The project is led by the Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (Germany) and brings together 12 institutions and 3 private companies, representing 7 European countries. The complete list of project partners can be found here.
Funding
ESiWACE is a project funded under the program H2020-EU.1.4.1.3. - Development, deployment and operation of ICT-based e-infrastructures, grant agreement No 675191.
Timeline
ESiWACE will run from September 2015 to August 2019.