Periodic Reporting for period 1 - DT-GEO (A Digital Twin for GEOphysical extremes)
Berichtszeitraum: 2022-09-01 bis 2023-08-31
Many parts of the world are exposed to geohazards that can induce devastating local and global impacts. Geophysical extremes are responsible for at least 10% of the losses caused by all kinds of natural disasters worldwide, and the associated risk shows an increasing trend over recent decades. With present computational capabilities and data volumes entering the Exascale Era, digital twins of the Earth system are becoming able to mimic the different components (atmosphere, ocean, land, lithosphere) with unrivaled precision, providing analyses (replicas), forecasts, and what if scenarios for natural hazards and their impacts. The main objective of DT-GEO is to develop and deploy a pre-operational prototype of Digital Twin (DT) on geophysical extremes addressing specific hazardous phenomena from volcanoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and anthropogenically-induced extremes. DT-GEO embeds 12 self-contained Digital Twin Components (DTCs) or workflows that will be verified in operational environments at 13 Site Demonstrators (SDs) of particular relevance, for potential future integration in the Destination Earth initiative and the European Plate Observing System (EPOS). The resulting data-driven workflows will be deployed in world-class HPC infrastructures and virtual cloud environments (FENIX RI and EuroHPC systems) together with a flexible ecosystem ensuring data quality management through an automatic FAIR validation and interoperability between the DTCs. In terms of impact, the ambition of DT-GEO is to address challenging scientific questions and/or to assist in hazard assessment, territorial planning, early warning forecast, urgent computing, rapid post-event assessment, or resource exploitation in relation to the occurrence of a geophysical extreme event.
According to the plan, the activities performed during the first reporting period (M1 to M12) have focussed on the first project implementation phase (i.e. setup of the twin architecture), including:
- Collection of requirements and specifications of the DTCs (milestone MS1). A total of 65 different requirements have been collected in terms of workflow management system, data and storage management, software deployment and execution tools, portability, usability, interoperability and accessibility. This has produced a mapping to the software components of the DT-GEO architecture, whose first version design has been included in D2.1
- Design and development of the DT architecture (MS3) including early implementation of DTCs using the PyCOMPSs programming model, set up of a workflow registry and software Catalog in an organization repository (GitLab) for managing the computational workflows centrally, and a framework for recording workflow provenance (reproducibility).
- Identification of a metadata scheme extending the current CERIF schema being used in EPOS-ERIC to fully describe the DTCs with rich metadata.
- Setup of the computational infrastructure (MS2) for on-demand access to HPC and cloud including technical support, design and setup of the FAIR quality-based ecosystem (e.g. SQAaaS using CI/CD pipelines).
(see the periodic report part B for details)
- Collection of requirements and specifications of the DTCs (milestone MS1). A total of 65 different requirements have been collected in terms of workflow management system, data and storage management, software deployment and execution tools, portability, usability, interoperability and accessibility. This has produced a mapping to the software components of the DT-GEO architecture, whose first version design has been included in D2.1
- Design and development of the DT architecture (MS3) including early implementation of DTCs using the PyCOMPSs programming model, set up of a workflow registry and software Catalog in an organization repository (GitLab) for managing the computational workflows centrally, and a framework for recording workflow provenance (reproducibility).
- Identification of a metadata scheme extending the current CERIF schema being used in EPOS-ERIC to fully describe the DTCs with rich metadata.
- Setup of the computational infrastructure (MS2) for on-demand access to HPC and cloud including technical support, design and setup of the FAIR quality-based ecosystem (e.g. SQAaaS using CI/CD pipelines).
(see the periodic report part B for details)
Project phase 1 is too early to evaluate results. In phase 3, DT-GEO is expected to contribute to an informed forecast of the Earth behavior on different time-scales, creating new business opportunities at European and global levels, measured by the involvement of the private and public sectors exploiting the developed products (e.g. exploration of resources in general, hazard assessment, aviation security, (re-)insurance companies, etc). The eventual integration of DT-GEO in Destination Earth will require a second implementation phase in which DTCs should reach a TRL of 8-9 (e.g. upcoming HORIZON-INFRA-2024-TECH-01-03 call for New digital twins for Destination Earth). Further uptake and success can depend also on establishing an urgent computing access mode in the EuroHPC systems and on policies of RIs and related ERICs, e.g. country membership, regulatory framework, etc, which may put some limitations/restrictions to access data, digital components and services required by DT-GEO.