The Destination Earth initiative (DestinE) has received two of the prestigious HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards 2024 for its innovative use of high-performance computing. The initiative of the European Commission received the award for “Best Use of HPC in Physical Sciences” and the Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin, developed by ECMWF and a consortium led by CSC IT Center for Science, received the award for Top HPC-Enabled Scientific Achievement. This outstanding recognition comes only two-and-a-half years after DestinE set sail.
HPCwire, a world reference magazine covering HPC and supercomputing (SC), has for more than 20 years organised the Readers’ Choice Awards, a coveted prize in which both the nominations and voting process depends entirely on the global HPCwire community. The decision was announced on Monday 18 November.
Read more in our Press Release.
“Given the outstanding quality of the nominee field, it is truly an honour to see that the efforts we have been carrying out together with our many partner institutions across Europe to develop DestinE Digital Twins have been rewarded with two of the prestigious HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards, only two and a half years after starting this adventure.
These two awards for DestinE are a strong recognition, first for the bold action undertaken by the European Commission in launching the initiative, that essentially wouldn’t be possible without the strategic partnership with the EuroHPC JU and the use of its world class supercomputers. The awards also endorse the fast achievements made by ECMWF and our partner institutions towards building and demonstrating the capabilities of DestinE digital twins, and more particularly developing an operational climate projection framework with the Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin (Climate DT) implemented by CSC together with partners across Europe, in close collaboration with ECMWF.
Our efforts to exploit the state-of-the-art supercomputers provided by the EuroHPC JU, for the benefit of society, the outstanding work of all the partners with we are working so closely, under the leadership of the European Commission DG CNECT have not gone unnoticed and that is very motivating for everyone involved,” said Irina Sandu, Director for Destination Earth at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF).
The announcement of the winners is made every year during the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking and Analysis (the SC series) and for this SC24, ECMWF’s Head of Earth System Modelling Peter Dueben and Lead of HPC Applications, Ioan Hadade, received the award on 20 November at SC24 in the name of ECMWF, together with CSC’s Pekka Manninen, Director of Science and Technology at CSC IT Center for Science, who is the principal investigator of the Climate DT consortium.
Dueben, who is in Atlanta to participate in the conference and give a plenary session talk about “The Digital Revolution of Earth System Modelling” described the excitement around DestinE that he could sense from colleagues around the world.
“Throughout SC24 we have felt the interest and curiosity in the scientific and technical developments of DestinE’s digital twins by fellow participants,” said Peter Dueben, “including both the angle of km-scale Earth system modelling and the innovative use of HPC and machine learning. We are very proud to receive the awards together with our partners from CSC. It is great that our hard work to speed-up and drive developments towards a new era of Earth system modelling is recognised by the community and we are looking forward to improving our understanding of weather and climate and to push the limit of what we are able to predict when using the new tools,” said Peter Dueben.
Ioan Hadade was also invited to talk at SC24 in a panel about “Building a Global Data Streaming Community: Lessons Learnt, Potential Tools, Challenges and Opportunities – The European and U.S. Ecosystems Address the Latest Paradigm Shift Towards Global Data Streaming in Large Data Systems.” Hadade explained the strong sense of community in the HPC ecosystem, where scientists are working to push the limits of what’s possible today.
“DestinE is groundbreaking in many ways. The session I participated in is an example. The use of data streaming in HPC is revolutionising science in many fields, since it helps to handle key issues when it comes to extreme scale computing, such as storage capacity and costs. The HPCwire RCA2024 ceremony and the SC24 in general is a great opportunity to meet colleagues from other institutions that are working to push the limits of supercomputing, facing the same challenges that we do, and share the future solutions. And for me personally, it was a great pleasure to see that our two years of intense efforts to deploy, optimise and run this new generation of earth system models on the EuroHPC systems, were recognised by the HPCWire Readers.” Hadade said.
The Destination Earth initiative of the European Union, implemented by ECMWF, ESA and EUMETSAT together with over 100 institutions across Europe, received the award for “Best Use of HPC in Physical Sciences” category with the following introduction: “The Destination Earth initiative uses EuroHPC supercomputers including LUMI, and HPE Cray supercomupter at CSC to create digital twins of the Earth system. DestinE provides a novel capability to perform bespoke high-resolution simulations to investigate possible evolutions of the climate and its extreme weather events, supporting decision-makers to better respond and adapt to these challenges.”
The Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin developed by Finland’s CSC IT Center for Science and a wide consortium of climate, supercomputing centres, national meteorological services and academia across Europe, under a contract procured by ECMWF, received the “Top HPC-Enabled Scientific Achievement” award with the following introduction: “The Destination Earth Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin operationalizes global multi-decadal climate projections, and in 2024 it produced its first projections at fine spatial (5km) resolution. Such simulations enable evaluating impacts of climate change from global to local scales, supporting decision-making for climate change adaptation,” reads the text confirming the award.
“I am proud and happy that the Climate DT consortium received this recognition. The Climate DT is a truly collaborative effort on state-of-the-art technology contributed by more than 100 persons from leading climate science and supercomputing centers across Europe CSC IT Center for Science and partners in close collaboration with ECMWF,” said Pekka Manninen.
Destination Earth is a European Union-funded initiative launched in 2022, with the aim to build a digital replica of the Earth system by 2030. The initiative is being jointly implemented under the leadership of DG CNECT by three entrusted entities: the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), responsible for the creation of the first two ‘digital twins’ and the ‘Digital Twin Engine’, the European Space Agency (ESA) responsible for building the ‘Core Service Platform’, and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), responsible for the creation of the ‘Data Lake’.
We acknowledge the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking for awarding this project strategic access to the EuroHPC supercomputers LUMI, hosted by CSC (Finland), and the LUMI consortium, Marenostrum5, hosted by BSC (Spain) Leonardo, hosted by Cineca (Italy) and MeluXina, hosted by LuxProvide (Luxembourg) through a EuroHPC Special Access call.
More information about Destination Earth is on the Destination Earth website and the EU Commission website.
For more information about ECMWF’s role visit ecmwf.int/DestinE
For any questions related to the role of ECMWF in Destination Earth, please use the following email links: