Overview
ECMWF held the 20th Workshop on HPC in Meteorology in the historic city of Bologna. Whilst there was a visit to the Tecnopolo di Bologna – ECMWF’s purpose-built data centre and latest supercomputing facility – the main workshop programme was hosted in downtown Bologna, which provided delegates with opportunities for evening socialising and to explore the rich cultural environment of the region.
Workshop theme
With increasingly more heterogeneous technology being integrated to deliver HPC & research infrastructure solutions, combined with the growth in complementary cloud-based services and raising diversity in the research domains requiring access to computational facilities to deliver insight - the theme of the 20th HPC & Meteorology Workshop was "Diversifying HPC".
Workshop description
Every second year ECMWF hosts a workshop on the use of high performance computing in meteorology.
The workshop brought together experts in high-performance computing from across the national weather centres, academia and industry to discuss and present recent developments in high-performance computing for weather forecasting applications.
Under the theme of " Diversifying HPC" we aimed to cover a range of topics exploring the challenges and opportunities these present to the weather & climate community, from identifying people and encouraging greater diversity in our communities, the diversity in the technology being deployed in delivering solutions (heterogeneous/modular computing), and increasing diversity regarding the future of supercomputing both with hybrid on-premise/cloud integration and alignment with AI/ML community developments.
Workshop aims
Our aim was to provide a forum where users from our Member States and around the world could report on recent experience, achievements, and future plans in the field of high performance computing
Key topics
- Opportunities presented by heterogenous computational ecosystems
- Diversifying workflows
- Porting of weather and climate codes to heterogeneous architectures
- Emerging high-performance computing technologies and associated operational considerations (including energy awareness)
- Challenges in diversifying and identifying technical expertise
- Aligning conventional HPC & ML techniques to benefit weather and climate
- Digital twins of the Earth
The workshop comprised of keynote talks from invited speakers, 20-30 minute overview talks and expert presentations, interspersed with various networking opportunities throughout the week.