About the partner
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is an international organisation supported by 34 European and Mediterranean States. ECMWF's longstanding principal objectives are the development of numerical methods for medium-range weather forecasting, the operational delivery of medium-to-seasonal range weather forecasts for distribution to the meteorological services of the Member States, leading scientific and technical research directed to the improvement of these forecasts, and the collection and storage of appropriate meteorological data. ECMWF has extensive competence in operating complex global forecasting suites on high-performance computers and transitioning top-level science from research to operations exploiting innovative approaches in computing science to fulfil the tight runtime and delivery constraints required by Member States. ECMWF has signed the delegation agreement with the European Commission to operate the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service and the Copernicus Climate Change Service and is also implementing the Destination Earth Project together with ESA and EUMETSAT to build Digital Twins of the Earth.
Role in the project
The work of ECMWF in ESiWACE3 links closely to ECMWF’s own Scalability Programme launched in 2013 that aims at developing the next-generation forecasting system addressing the challenges of future exascale high-performance computing and data management architectures.
ECMWF will lead WP2, and, in particular, the work will focus on using domain-specific languages in weather and climate models, using reduced numerical precision arithmetic to speed up simulations, and exploring data compression algorithms to reduce the data volume of model output.
List of people involved
Dr Peter Dueben (WP2 leader), Dr Christian Kuehnlein
Relevant infrastructure and services
ECMWF's computer facility includes supercomputers, archiving systems and networks. ECMWF’s Atos BullSequana XH2000 supercomputer facility is housed in ECMWF’s data centre in Bologna, Italy. ECMWF’s Atos supercomputer has over one million processors spread across 4 clusters and a performance of about 30 petaflops. The data storage facilities of ECMWF hold a couple of hundreds of petabytes of primary data related to Earth system sciences.
ECMWF uses its computing and data handling infrastructure to produce operational forecasts, archive Earth system data, and disseminate global model output to member states under tight schedules.