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Energy-efficient SCalable Algorithms for weather Prediction at Exascale

Fact Sheet

Result in Brief

Reporting

Results

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Objective

"ESCAPE will develop world-class, extreme-scale computing capabilities for European operational numerical weather prediction (NWP) and future climate models. The biggest challenge for state-of-the-art NWP arises from the need to simulate complex physical phenomena within tight production schedules. Existing extreme-scale application software of weather and climate services is ill-equipped to adapt to the rapidly evolving hardware. This is exacerbated by other drivers for hardware
development, with processor arrangements not necessarily optimal for weather and climate simulations. ESCAPE will redress this imbalance through innovation actions that fundamentally reform Earth-system modelling.
ESCAPE addresses the ETP4HPC SRA 'Energy and resiliency' priority topic, developing a holistic understanding of energy-efficiency for extreme-scale applications using heterogeneous architectures, accelerators and special compute units. The three key reasons why this proposal will provide the necessary means to take a huge step forward in weather and climate modelling as well as interdisciplinary research on energy-efficient high-performance computing are:
1) Defining and encapsulating the fundamental algorithmic building blocks (""Weather & Climate Dwarfs"") underlying weather and climate services. This is the pre-requisite for any subsequent co-design, optimization, and adaptation efforts.
2) Combining ground-breaking frontier research on algorithm development for use in extreme-scale, high-performance computing applications, minimizing time- and cost-to-solution.
3) Synthesizing the complementary skills of all project partners. This includes ECMWF, the world leader in global NWP together with leading European regional forecasting consortia, teaming up with excellent university research and experienced high-performance computing centres, two world-leading hardware companies, and one European start-up SME, providing entirely new knowledge and technology to the field.
"

Programme(s)

H2020-EU.1.2.2. - FET Proactive

Topic(s)

FETHPC-1-2014 - HPC Core Technologies, Programming Environments and Algorithms for Extreme Parallelism and Extreme Data Applications

Call for proposal

H2020-FETHPC-2014

See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

RIA - Research and Innovation action

Leaflet | Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors, Credit: EC-GISCO, © EuroGeographics for the administrative boundaries

Coordinator

EUROPEAN CENTRE FOR MEDIUM-RANGE WEATHER FORECASTS

Address

Shinfield Park
Rg2 9ax Reading

United Kingdom

Activity type

Higher or Secondary Education Establishments

EU Contribution

€ 702 185

Website

Contact the organisation

Participants (11)

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METEO-FRANCE

France

EU Contribution

€ 293 175

INSTITUT ROYAL METEOROLOGIQUE DE BELGIQUE

Belgium

EU Contribution

€ 312 500

DANMARKS METEOROLOGISKE INSTITUT

Denmark

EU Contribution

€ 275 610

EIDGENOESSISCHES DEPARTEMENT DES INNERN

Switzerland

EU Contribution

€ 395 375

DEUTSCHER WETTERDIENST

Germany

EU Contribution

€ 65 625

LOUGHBOROUGH UNIVERSITY

United Kingdom

EU Contribution

€ 293 657,50

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND GALWAY

Ireland

EU Contribution

€ 367 960

INSTYTUT CHEMII BIOORGANICZNEJ POLSKIEJ AKADEMII NAUK

Poland

EU Contribution

€ 475 500

BULL SAS

France

EU Contribution

€ 269 280

NVIDIA SWITZERLAND AG

Switzerland

EU Contribution

€ 193 335

OPTALYSYS

United Kingdom

EU Contribution

€ 333 750

Project information

ESCAPE

Grant agreement ID: 671627

Project website

Start date

1 October 2015
End date

30 September 2018

Funded under:

H2020-EU.1.2.2.

Overall budget:

€ 3 977 952,50
EU contribution

€ 3 977 952,50

Coordinated by:

EUROPEAN CENTRE FOR MEDIUM-RANGE WEATHER FORECASTS

United Kingdom

This project is featured in...

RESEARCH*EU MAGAZINE

Defining Europe’s role in a complex international order

Issue 82, May 2019

DE EN ES FR IT PL

Boosted computing increases European weather forecasting accuracy

The biggest challenge for state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction arises from the need to simulate complex physical phenomena within tight production schedules. Software and hardware shortcomings are holding back weather and climate modelling.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND ENVIRONMENT

Current extreme-scale application software of weather and climate services isn’t very efficient on existing central processing unit (CPU)-type processors. It has about 5 % peak performance, mostly due to a lack of arithmetic intensity. The software also isn’t able to adapt to rapidly evolving options for new processor hardware mainly because of a lack of flexibility in mapping specific computational problems onto heterogeneous computing units. This problem is further exacerbated by other drivers for hardware development that aren’t necessarily ideal for weather and climate simulations. Boosting performance and energy-efficiency of weather and climate modelling The EU-funded ESCAPE project aimed to “restore this imbalance through actions that fundamentally reform Earth system modelling,” says coordinator Dr Peter Bauer. The project developed a holistic understanding of energy efficiency for extreme-scale applications using heterogeneous architectures, accelerators and special compute units. The project team developed and tested the concept of fundamental algorithmic building blocks called dwarfs. Dwarfs represent functional units in the forecasting model. They developed new algorithms specifically designed for better energy efficiency and improved portability. “Assessing numerical methods and algorithms for dwarfs rather than entire models reduces the complexity of the code,” explains Dr Bauer. “It enables high-performance computing (HPC) centres, research groups and hardware vendors to focus on specific aspects of performance for which code restructuring and adaptation to novel processor architectures is more straightforward.” Project partners then adapted and optimised the resulting dwarfs in terms of computing performance for different hardware architectures. For spectral transforms on CPUs, they achieved efficiency gains of up to 40 %. Code optimisation for graphics processing units (GPUs) delivered speed-up factors of about 10-50 on a single node, and again by a factor of 2-3 when deployed on multiple GPUs. The ESCAPE team also focused on domain-specific languages (DSLs). When adapted to GPUs with a DSL, a dwarf calculating the advection of air showed a speed improvement of a factor of two compared to the manually adapted version. They investigated a range of numerical methods exploiting multi-grid solvers and different types of spatial discretisation and time stepping. Improvements in predictive skills for weather and climate ESCAPE will impact European excellence for employing exascale HPC in helping to facilitate one of the largest societal impact areas: high-resolution weather forecasting. More precise forecasts in both time and space are critical for travel, health, work and safety. “The weather’s impact on society via forecasting and preparation has been reduced thanks to ESCAPE’s predictive skill advances,” Dr Bauer says. “By modifying numerical algorithms and using new programming models, substantial improvements to both weather and climate predictions will be possible and affordable, leading to reliable and timely forecasted warnings,” concludes Dr Bauer. “ESCAPE represents a huge step forward in weather and climate modelling.” The project directly benefits all European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) members and cooperating countries. It will support both the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service and the Copernicus Climate Change Service that rely on ECMWF’s Integrated Forecasting System.

Keywords

ESCAPE, weather, climate, domain-specific languages (DSLs), dwarf, forecasting, modelling, high-performance computing (HPC), graphics processing units (GPUs), energy efficiency, exascale

Project information

ESCAPE

Grant agreement ID: 671627

Project website

Start date

1 October 2015
End date

30 September 2018

Funded under:

H2020-EU.1.2.2.

Overall budget:

€ 3 977 952,50
EU contribution

€ 3 977 952,50

Coordinated by:

EUROPEAN CENTRE FOR MEDIUM-RANGE WEATHER FORECASTS

This project is featured in...

RESEARCH*EU MAGAZINE

Defining Europe’s role in a complex international order

Issue 82, May 2019

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Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ESCAPE (Energy-efficient SCalable Algorithms for weather Prediction at Exascale)

Reporting period: 2017-04-01 to 2018-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

ESCAPE developed world-class, extreme-scale computing capabilities for European operational numerical weather prediction (NWP) and future climate models.
The biggest challenge for state-of-the-art NWP arises from the need to simulate complex physical phenomena within tight production schedules. Existing extreme-scale application software of weather and climate services is (i) not very efficient on existing CPU-type processors reaching only 5% of the peak performance, mostly due a lack of arithmetic intensity, and (ii) ill-equipped to adapt to rapidly evolving options for new processor hardware, mostly due to a lack of flexibility for mapping specific computational problems onto heterogeneous computing units. This problem is exacerbated by other drivers for hardware development that are not necessarily optimal for weather and climate simulations.
ESCAPE will redress this imbalance through innovation actions that fundamentally reform Earth-system modelling. ESCAPE addresses the ETP4HPC Strategic Research Agenda 'Energy and resiliency' priority topic, developing a holistic understanding of energy-efficiency for extreme-scale applications using heterogeneous architectures, accelerators and special compute units. The three key steps towards much enhanced performance and energy-efficiency for weather and climate modelling are:
• Defining and encapsulating the fundamental algorithmic building blocks ('Weather & Climate Dwarfs') of weather and climate prediction models. This is the prerequisite for any subsequent co-design, optimization, and adaptation efforts.
• Combining ground-breaking frontier research on algorithm development for use in extreme-scale, high-performance computing applications aiming to minimize time- and cost-to-solution.
• Synthesizing the complementary skills of all project partners in all necessary domains, at the interface between applied and computational science.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

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Project information

ESCAPE

Grant agreement ID: 671627

Project website

Start date

1 October 2015
End date

30 September 2018

Funded under:

H2020-EU.1.2.2.

Overall budget:

€ 3 977 952,50
EU contribution

€ 3 977 952,50

Coordinated by:

EUROPEAN CENTRE FOR MEDIUM-RANGE WEATHER FORECASTS

This project is featured in...

RESEARCH*EU MAGAZINE

Defining Europe’s role in a complex international order

Issue 82, May 2019

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Last update: 22 August 2017

Record number: 197542

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Boosted computing increases European weather forecasting accuracy

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CORDIS

Objective

Coordinator

Participants (11)

Project information

This project is featured in...

Boosted computing increases European weather forecasting accuracy

Keywords

Project information

This project is featured in...

Discover other articles in the same domain of application

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ESCAPE (Energy-efficient SCalable Algorithms for weather Prediction at Exascale)

Project information

This project is featured in...

Deliverables

Publications

Project information

This project is featured in...

News

Project information

This project is featured in...

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