11.10.2022

This virtual workshop was organised within the scope of ESiWACE2 under the lead of CMCC and had a total of 14 speakers organised in three tracks:

  • European Exascale hardware
  • Programming models and hardware interplay
  • Machine learning



Donatello Elia (CMCC) opened the workshop floor and guided participants through the virtual programme.

European Exascale hardware

Session 1 on "European Exascale hardware" was chaired by Erwan Raffin (Atos) and comprised presentations on the three European pre-exascale systems procured and installed under the umbrella of the  EuroHPC joint undertaking: "Leonardo" currently being built at CINECA in Italy, "LUMI" hosted by CSC in Kajaani, Finland, and MareNostrum5 at Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain. Furthermore, the EUPEX (European pilot for exascale) and EUPILOT projects were introduced.

Programming models and hardware interplay

The second session on programming models and hardware interplay chaired by Andrew Porter (STFC) addressed the use of domain specific languages (DSLs) for climate and earth system modelling, experiences with the C++ library Kokkos in the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) and DestinE: opportunities & challenges for digital twins of the Earth System. 

Machine learning

Digital twins of the earth were addressed once more in session 3 on machine learning chaired by Peter Dueben (ECMWF) and Italo Epicoco (CMCC). Moreover, this session saw a variety of presentations on atmospheric physics-guided machine learning, a generative deep learning approach to stochastic downscaling for precipitation forecasts, deep learning and differentiable forecasts, and machine learning for weather forecasts.      

Attendance and visibility

The range of topics addressed by the workshop was appealing for people from different areas and expertise. In fact, besides participants from academia and research centers, also representatives from industries had registered, with the level of experience of the participants fairly distributed among early-career, mid-level and senior.
Although being virtual, the workshop was successful with a lot of attendees in each track.  About 132 people from 22 countries all over the world had registered to attend the workshop. In particular, the most represented countries where: Germany, UK, Italy, France and USA.
All virtual talks were delivered live in a videoconference and were recorded for later publication on the ESiWACE YouTube channel or via similar means. During the presentations, participants entered their questions in an online document, which were addressed by the speakers at the end of their talks.

For additional details about the workshop including the list of organisers and the link to the workshop agenda, see the workshop event page.