New call for proposals in support of EU weather and climate model communities

16 Sep 2019 - 3 min

The Netherlands eScience Center and Atos-Bull have announced a call for proposals for the EU-funded projects ‘Center of Excellence in Simulation of Weather and Climate in Europe’ (ESiWACE and...

The call aims to support the weather and climate model developing communities in Europe with preparing their simulation codes for (pre-)exascale computing platforms.

Large and complex applications

Weather and climate models are large and complex applications that experience a tension field between investments to enhance certain features, increasing fidelity, spatio-temporal resolutions or resolving more physical processes, and investments to adapt the software to the latest hardware architectures. Generally, these improvements go hand in hand, as higher accuracy can often only be achieved through increased resolution or by extending the ensemble size and thereby increasing the required computational resources. Where the modeling developments are driven by scientific expertise, the performance optimization is driven by the desire to use the compute resources efficiently and at sufficient scale.

However, after a long period of relative stability, the computing infrastructure is rapidly evolving and diversifying, with more change on the horizon. Adapting existing software to the latest computing platforms and exploiting the full capability of the architecture requires specific expertise and extensive changes at the source code level. As such, continued development of weather and climate models requires new collaborations between experts from different fields.

Preparing software for computing platforms and architecture

The ESiWACE and ESiWACE2 projects aim to improve model efficiency and prepare the software to enable model execution on existing and near-future hardware architectures and simulate experiments at unprecedented grid resolutions or ensemble sizes. In addition, it will include computationally expensive physical processes that were previously unfeasible.

The joint eScience Center/Atos-Bull call will support this objective by stimulating new collaborations that provide consultancy and engineering efforts in support of exascale preparations of weather and climate model developing communities. These collaborative projects will allow experts in high performance computing (HPC) and accelerated computing to work together with the model developers to advance the codebase in order that (parts of) the model can be executed efficiently on modern CPU processor or modern computing accelerators, such as Graphics Processing Units (GPUs).

Read the full call description

Funding

A total of four proposals will be granted as part of the call. Each grant will consist of in-kind support in the form of one or two skilled Research Software Engineers (RSEs) employed by either the Netherlands eScience Center or Atos-Bull. The RSEs will work remotely on the project for 6 person months (PMs) during 2020. The hours will be planned flexibly and in mutual agreement with the applicant.

Procedure and deadline

Following submission, a technical review will be carried out on the technical feasibility and state-of-the art technology. The proposals that pass the review will be sent to an external scientific review committee for a final selection based on scientific merit and impact. The accepted proposals will be announced in December 2019.

The submission deadline is 14:00 CET on 1 November 2019. Proposals sent after this deadline will no longer be considered.

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