The 3rd ESiWACE3 Hackathon, Porting Earth System Models to the First EuroHPC Exascale System (JUPITER), took place on 20–22 October 2026 at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), Germany. Around 30 participants worked in eight teams, supported by nine mentors from the Netherlands eScience Center, Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) and Bull, to address the challenges of running weather and climate applications on Europe’s first exascale supercomputer.
The three-day event provided an opportunity for researchers and HPC experts to collaborate on porting, optimizing and scaling Earth System Models for JUPITER, which features NVIDIA GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips.
Eight teams tackling exascale challenges
The teams worked on a diverse range of topics, including scalable deep learning for global ocean circulation, satellite-data training infrastructure for weather modelling, and exascale experiments with the TSMP2 model. Other projects focused on porting ICON/MESSy and NEMO ocean model components to GPUs, enabling massive-parallel particle trajectory calculations, improving HPC workflows on JUPITER, and containerizing applications.
Throughout the hackathon, participants received hands-on guidance from nine mentors: Alessio Sclocco, Bouwe Andela and Bart Schilperoort from the Netherlands eScience Center; Lars Hoffmann, Rakesh Sarma, Vladyslav Pushenko, Sergey Sukov and Michal Rajski from FZJ; and Antoine Morvan from Bull.
The winning team, working on “Scalable Deep Learning for Global Ocean Circulation”, received the €1,500 travel fellowship sponsored by Do IT Now. The award will support the team’s attendance at an academic conference in Europe, providing an opportunity to present their work and exchange knowledge with the wider scientific community.
Do IT Now Group provides global consulting, installation, optimization and managed services for High Performance Computing, Quantum Computing and AI, serving clients across on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments.
ESiWACE3 thanks Do IT Now for supporting the hackathon and its participants, as well as all the mentors and researchers who contributed to making the event a collaborative opportunity to advance Earth System Models for the exascale era.
