Scalability projects gather steam at Rome conference

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High-performance computing

Three EU-funded scalability-related projects in which ECMWF is closely involved are introducing themselves to the wider high-performance computing community at an international workshop taking place in Rome.

ESiWACE (Excellence in Simulation of Weather and Climate in Europe) is one of eight new Centres of Excellence (CoEs) that have been selected by the European Commission to help strengthen Europe’s leading position in high-performance computing applications. ECMWF is one of the partners in the project, which is coordinated by the German Climate Computing Centre (DKRZ).

ESiWACE will represent the climate and weather community at the Rome meeting together with the ESCAPE project (Energy-efficient Scalable Algorithms for Weather Prediction at Exascale), which is coordinated by ECMWF.

ESCAPE, which has been selected by the European Commission as an FETHPC project (Future and Emerging Technologies: High Performance Computing), will formally get under way at a kick-off meeting to be held at ECMWF on 1 and 2 October.

Another EU-funded project represented in Rome in which ECMWF is involved is NextGenIO (Next Generation I/O), which aims to develop new hardware to accelerate I/O processes. All three are key elements in ECMWF’s drive to prepare its numerical weather prediction systems for future, energy-efficient supercomputer architectures.

The workshop in Rome, which takes place on 29 and 30 September under the auspices of the European Commission, aims to facilitate collaboration between the newly funded CoEs, the FETHPC projects, PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), and ETP4HPC (European Technology Platform for High Performance Computing).

Speaking from Rome, Peter Bauer, the head of ECMWF's Scalability Programme, said: "As ECMWF is the coordinator of the weather prediction community in ESiWACE, coordinates the ESCAPE project and is also a partner in the NextGenIO project, the meeting has given us an opportunity to promote our community's challenges and HPC requirements, and to seek collaboration with other initiatives and vendors. Meetings of this kind will be organised on a regular basis to foster further exchanges, and to forge partnerships for future funded projects supporting ECMWF's Scalability Programme."

For more details on the workshop, see ECMWF and DKRZ’s press release.

For more details on the projects, visit the ESiWACE and ESCAPE web pages.

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