The EU’s Destination Earth initiative (DestinE) will be present at the EuroHPC Summit 2025, taking place on 18-20 March in Kraków, Poland. The EuroHPC summit brings together key stakeholders from across Europe’s high-performance computing (HPC) and quantum computing ecosystem. DestinE’s will be highlighted in a dedicated at session at the summit, by representatives from the European Commission’s DG CNECT, ECMWF and its partners’ organisations and the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU).
DestinE – the ambitious endeavour of the European Commission’s DG CNECT aiming to build a digital twin of the Earth system – will be once again present at this year’s EuroHPC summit in Kraków. The session taking place on March 19 at 14.00 (CET) will showcase DestinE’s digital twins and AI activities, enabled by the strategic partnership with EuroHPC, and what lessons from DestinE can be fed into EU’s emerging AI factories. Destination Earth has an important AI/ML component that the DG CNECT has reinforced during the second phase of the initiative. Find out more about the role of AI in DestinE in our recent explainer.
Grazyna Piesiewicz, Head of Unit at DG CNECT, will open the session with a keynote speech, emphasising the strategic partnership between DestinE and EuroHPC in shaping Europe’s digital future.
The DestinE system in action
The session is divided into two panel discussion sessions, each of them featuring experts from leading European institutions. The first session will focus on DestinE’s digital twins which are implemented on different EuroHPC supercomputers, highlighting how they augment our capabilities to respond and adapt to extreme events and climate change.
Irina Sandu, Director for Destination Earth at ECMWF, will present a few highlights on DestinE’s digital twins before engaging in a discussion moderated by Athanasia Evangelinou from EuroHPC JU, alongside representatives from DG CNECT, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), Geosphere Austria, and the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PNSC).
From DestinE to AI factories: Lessons in collaboration, data, and AI workflows
Following this, a second panel discussion, moderated by Florian Pappenberger, Deputy Director-General and Director of Forecasts and Services at ECMWF, will focus on how DestinE collaborative and innovative efforts could feed into EU’s emerging AI factories.
Josephine Wood, EuroHPC JU Head of Unit, Strategy and Governance, Mariona Sanz, Head of Innovation and Business Development at BSC, Jenni Kontkanen, Development Manager in Digital Twin Technologies at CSC IT Center for Science, Gabriela Scipione, Head of Data Management and Analytics at CINECA, and Valentin Plugaru, CTO of Luxprovide, will discuss how lessons learned in terms of collaboration in HPC and AI, of onboarding users and ensuring interoperability in DestinE, can support setting up the AI factories, and how EU’s AI factories could act as a multiplier beyond DestinE.
DestinE’s continued engagement with EuroHPC
DestinE’s presence at the EuroHPC Summit builds on its participation in last year’s edition in Antwerp, Belgium. At the 2024 Summit, ECMWF showcased how DestinE applies cutting-edge physical and AI-driven models to develop the first digital twins of the Earth. ECMWF team for DestinE was also present in the 2023 edition.
Next to the panel discussions, Irina Sandu and Florian Pappenberger will also take part in this year’s career fair to engage with early career scientists in HPC and Quantum Computing to discuss career opportunities.
With the theme “Connecting HPC, Quantum and AI technologies”, the EuroHPC Summit 2025 presents an opportunity to showcase DestinE’s success in European collaboration on the topics of earth system modelling, AI and supercomputing, facilitating discussions, and fostering new collaborations.
Registered participants of the EuroHPC summit can watch the panel sessions in person at the ICE Congress Centre, Krakow. Only the plenary sessions are streamed online.
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: