French multinational IT services firm Atos and the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) have announced聽 a new Center of Excellence in high-performance computing, AI and Quantum computing for Weather & Climate.
The Center will be based at ECMWF鈥檚 headquarters in Reading, UK, where it will provide their team of international researchers with access to emerging AI and Quantum Computing technologies and expertise, and benefit from ECMWF鈥檚 high-performance computing (HPC) resources to be soon located in Bologna, Italy.
The aim is to support ECMWF scientists in their work on medium and long-range weather forecasting and prediction and global climate modelling.
Using these latest advances in technology, ECMWF researchers will be able to improve the ability to forecast the occurrence and intensity of extreme weather events and other new weather phenomena triggered by climate change.
Equipped with Atos鈥� supercomputer, the Center of Excellence will also be supported by Atos experts and technology partners who will collaborate directly with ECMWF research scientists in order to develop new techniques to support next-generation weather forecasting, help boost climate and weather discovery and innovation, and help prepare ECMWF for future HPC and data handling architectures.
鈥淏ringing together world-class experts in computing, computational science and Earth system science is key to continuing to advance our medium- and long-range weather forecasting. The Center builds on a previous successful collaboration with Atos and will play a significant role in helping us to improve and reliably predict the occurrence and intensity of extreme weather events and other events associated with climate change significantly ahead of time,鈥� said Dr Florence Rabier, Director General at ECMWF.
鈥淭echnology will play a key role in supporting our experts in the field and enabling partners in our 34 Member and Co-operating States across Europe to continue to protect life and property in their countries.鈥�
Pierre Barnab茅, Senior Executive Vice-President, Head of Big Data & Cybersecurity at Atos added: 鈥淲e are thrilled to establish this Center of Excellence together with ECMWF, where researchers will be able to explore the different usages of HPC and AI through proof of concept production, as well as innovation workshops, courses and conferences.
“High-performance Computing assisted by artificial intelligence holds huge potential for the climate and weather. It also introduces new methods and techniques that are only just becoming available.鈥�
As part of the new Center of Excellence, one of the initial projects will be to develop Machine learning solutions for applications across the numerical weather prediction workflow that are customized towards the needs of Earth system modelling.
A second project will look to develop a CPU-GPU-based version of ECMWF鈥檚 Integrated Forecasting System (IFS) and the wave model WAM, and to prepare the ECMWF product-generation pipeline and data-centric workflows for new technologies.
As part of the Atos Center of Excellence (CoE) in Advanced Computing, the Weather & Climate CoE is Atos鈥� second CoE dedicated to HPC, AI and quantum technologies which is focused on a scientific domain.
The first being launched in July, together with the Wellcome Genome Campus and which is focused on Life Sciences.