The Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC; https://www.cmcc.it/) is a Foundation aimed at furthering knowledge in the field of climate variability, its causes and impacts and their interactions with the global climate, through the development of high-resolution simulations of the atmosphere and ocean, surface and underground hydrology, environmental and socio-economic impact models. CMCC relies on the extensive and established research experience of its co-founders: Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Università del Salento, Centro Italiano di Ricerche Aerospaziali, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, Università di Sassari, Università della Tuscia, Politecnico di Milano, Resources for the Future, Università di Bologna. The mission of CMCC is to investigate and model our climate system and its interactions with society to provide reliable, rigorous, and timely scientific results to stimulate sustainable growth, protect the environment and develop science driven adaptation and mitigation policies in a changing climate. CMCC represents an institutional reference point for decision makers, public institutions as well as private and public companies seeking technical-scientific support, both nationally and internationally. CMCC brings together highly qualified experts from different climate research areas in a single unique institution.
The following nine research Divisions work together in an interdisciplinary manner: ASC (Advanced Scientific Computing), CSP (Climate Simulations and Predictions), ECIP (Economic Analysis of Impact and Policy), IAFES (Impacts on Agriculture, Forests and Ecosystems Services), ODA (Ocean modeling and Data Assimilation), OPA (Ocean Predictions and Applications), RAAS (Risk Assessment and Adaptation Strategies), REMHI (REgional Models and geo-Hydrological Impacts), SEME (Sustainable Earth Modeling Economics).
The CMCC Supercomputing Center is the only computational facility in Italy specializing in Climate Change research. Housed in the Ecotekne complex (Lecce), the Supercomputing Center provides the technological infrastructure and computational capabilities required to develop simulations and models that are able to provide extremely accurate and detailed results.
The Advanced Scientific Computing (ASC) division carries out R&D activities on Computational Science applied to the Climate Change domain. In particular, it focuses on (i) the development of advanced computing techniques and innovative algorithms for an optimal exploitation of numerical models on HPC architectures (High End Computing – HEC), (ii) the analysis and mining of large volumes of scientific data and management of analytical workflows looking forward to exascale scenarios (Data Science – DS), (iii) the exploration of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning methods on (pre) exascale environments in the climate change domain (Exascale Machine Learning for Climate Change – EMLC2), and (iv) research on innovative digital platforms and tools for the delivery of new services in different sectors, such as agriculture, climate, disaster risk reduction, oceanography, water management, etc. (Production Platforms for Operational Services – PPOS). The Ocean modeling and Data Assimilation (ODA) Division focuses on the development and validation of ocean circulation and biogeochemical models at global and regional scales (Mediterranean and Black Sea). Such models are used in several different applications, which go from stand-alone simulations in hindcast and forecast mode to coupled configurations in the CMCC Earth System Model (ESM). Variational data assimilation methods are applied to rebuild the evolution of the system during the period of time covered by the in-situ and satellite observations (ocean reanalysis) and to produce realistic oceanic initial conditions to be used in the initialization of models for short-term forecasting and climate predictions on scales from the seasonal to the decadal ones (this last application is in collaboration with the CSP Division). In particular, an important objective of the ODA Division is to develop oceanographic numerical models and data assimilation systems for the operational production of global and regional oceanographic analyses and forecasts at a very high resolution.
Role in the project
CMCC’s contribution to ESiWACE2 is dedicated to WP1, WP2, WP4, WP5 and WP6.
CMCC will lead WP5 on Data Post-Processing, Analytics and Visualization. The main objective of WP5 is to provide a consistent view regarding the support for data post-processing, analytics and visualisation at scale in the weather and climate domain by building the proper ESDM extensions on top of the ESDM module developed in WP4.
In particular, the tasks in WP5 concern a) the design of the ESDM interface extensions to support in-flight analytics kernels for post-processing, analysis and visualization (PAV) needs; b) the identification, prioritization, implementation and validation of a set of common analytical kernels starting from a set of community-based tools; c) the development of a high-performance support to enable ESDM data parallelization for in-flight analytics; d) the validation of the ESDM postprocessing, analytics and visualization support on a set of representative case studies regarding community-based weather and climate applications.
More specifically, CMCC will also contribute to:
- WP1, regarding the development of the infrastructure for ocean production mode configurations and the porting to pre-exascale systems;
- WP2, by leading the task on watching emerging technologies and by contributing to the application of DSLs to ocean models;
- WP4, by contributing to the ESDM implementation and testing activities;
- WP5, by leading the WP and contributing to the design and implementation of the ESDM PAV runtime, as well as its interface to post-processing and analytics applications;
- WP6, by leading the training on HPDA tools and frameworks.
Names of the colleagues involved
Prof. Giovanni Aloisio, Dr. Alessandro D’Anca, Dr. Italo Epicoco, Donatello Elia, Dr. Simona Masina, Dr. Dorotea Iovino
Relevant infrastructure and services available for climate & weather
Infrastructure: In the first half of 2019, a new parallel scalar supercomputer called Zeus was installed. Zeus is based on 348 Lenovo SD530 dual processor nodes (for a total of 12.528 cores) all interconnected by means of an Infiniband EDR network. The new system has a computing power (theoretical peak performance) of 1.202 TFlops. The HPC storage infrastructure connected to Zeus consists of two Lenovo DSS-G260 storage systems, with identical configuration, which offer, overall, a usable capacity of 4 PetaBytes.
During 2019, the data center was also equipped with a level 2 (Tier2) storage system which offers a total capacity of over 4 PetaBytes. This system belongs to the storage class that meets the requirements of large storage capacity, instant data access (online storage), high levels of scalability and protection and is oriented to the provision of services, with a high degree of independence from data processing infrastructures and connected applications. In order to store and manage the huge amount of data produced by CMCC researchers, the data center is equipped with an archiving system (tape library) with a usable capacity of 5 PetaBytes.
Datasets: CMCC publishes about 500TB of climate simulations datasets in the CMIP5 and CMIP6 federated data archive related to CMCC models.
Software: CMCC provides the Ophidia software, a cross-domain High-Performance Data Analytics framework for the analysis of scientific, multi-dimensional datasets. This framework exploits a declarative, server side approach with parallel data analytics