ESIWACE

ESiWACE is a new initiative of the HPC ecosystem in Europe and leverages two established European networks: the European Network for Earth System modelling (ENES) representing the European climate modelling community and the world leading European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).

A main goal of ESiWACE is to 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.

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.

Within ESiWACE, ICHEC is working in Work Package 2, extending the XIOS IO Server tool. Currently XIOS supports NetCDF format files used by the climate community, but previous work by ICHEC enabling GRIB format, used by the weather community is being adapted to support new grid formats: icosahedral, cubed sphere and unstructured grids in particular, as well as scaling to the 1km resolutions targeted by ESiWACE.

The project has been funded by Horizon 2020, call H2020-EINFRA-2015-1 “Centres of Excellence for computing applications” of the DG Connect.