About the partner
The Netherlands eScience Center (NLeSC) is the Dutch national centre of excellence for developing and applying research software to advance academic research. The Research Software Engineers (RSEs) at the eScience Centre collaborate with academic researchers, enabling them to address compute-intensive and data-driven problems within their research. The RSEs are researchers that typically hold a PhD and have expertise in state-of-the-art computational technologies and a keen interest in developing research software. The Netherlands eScience Center is involved continuously in more than 50 collaborative research projects, spanning many different research disciplines and application domains, many of which are in the Climate Sciences.
Role in the project
In ESiWACE3, the Netherlands eScience Center is involved in several work packages.
In WP2, the eScience Centre works with the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) to create tools for automated performance, energy and accuracy testing and deployment. We will extend Kernel Tuner, a software development tool for automatic performance and energy optimisation of compute-intensive codes, to achieve this goal. We will extend Kernel Tuner with the necessary capabilities to test and benchmark the accuracy and compute performance of different implementation variants. The idea is to allow application developers to exploit the mixed-precision capabilities of modern architectures using automatic design space exploration. Ultimately, developers will be able to automate the process of empirically testing the performance, energy, and accuracy of many different implementation variants of their applications. This allows developers to optimally balance application performance between accuracy, compute performance, and energy efficiency.
The Netherlands eScience Center leads WP4 (HPC Services). The ESiWACE3 Services will continue and expand upon the services established in ESiWACE2 by creating collaborations between HPC experts and the weather and climate model developing community in Europe. The services aim to create collaborations to support community needs through guidance, engineering expertise, and advice to develop, maintain, optimise, and scale models to existing and upcoming computing infrastructure. Through open calls for service requests, we collect proposals which will be peer-reviewed and, when found eligible, will be granted in-kind support by the partners involved in providing the service. Specifically, we plan to provide support and guidance in porting model components to accelerators such as GPUs and novel architectures. In addition, we will create service projects aimed at helping users adopt and optimise their use of the advanced software development tools developed in WP1, WP2, and WP3.
In WP5, the eScience Centre is responsible for the organisation of several hackathons. These hackathons target weather and climate modellers at all career stages, from early career researchers to senior scientists and engineers. The participants will bring their codes to the hackathon and work in teams with HPC experts on specific topics. Hackathons will last 3-4 days and include brief tutorials on the relevant topics and technologies (e.g. data compression) and teamwork. Moreover, the eScience Centre also will contribute to developing training materials.
List of people involved
Dr Ben van Werkhoven (WP4 leader), Dr Gijs van den Oord, Stijn Heldens, Dr Alessio Sclocco
Relevant infrastructure and services
The Netherlands eScience Center does not own computing facilities. Instead, NLeSC participates in the DAS-6, a six-cluster wide-area distributed system that employs a large variety of HPC accelerators, including GPUs and FPGAs. DAS-6 is a developing platform for parallel and distributed applications and is not intended for long production runs.
In terms of services, the Netherlands eScience Centre is involved in many projects related to weather & climate.
The eScience Center has three main ways of collaboration:
1. Dutch researchers at universities or NWO/KNAW institutes can directly apply to any open project proposal calls listed on the eScience Centre website.
2. We can partner with you in submitting project proposals to national and international funding programs, ranging from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to European funding, such as Horizon Europe and EuroHPC. We have ample experience co-authoring project proposals and a relatively high success rate in obtaining funding.
3. If you already have funding and would like to tap into the expertise offered by the eScience Center, it is also possible to collaborate directly with us.