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Destination Earth (DestinE), the flagship initiative of the European Commission’s DG Connect is pushing the boundaries of Earth-system modelling and AI. To operate its digital twins of the Earth at global kilometre scale and establish AI training pipelines on high-resolution data, DestinE uses EuroHPC. This unprecedented strategic use of Europe’s high performance computing (HPC) facilities is foundational for DestinE and Europe at large. The partnership between the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) and DestinE is vital to assure sovereign digital infrastructure, AI deployment at scale, and trusted data ecosystems on weather & climate information to compete globally.

The Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin (Climate DT) and Weather-Induced Extremes Digital Twin (Extremes DT) run at kilometre-scale resolution and produce unprecedented volumes of hourly data across multi-decadal simulations. This makes it possible to derive new information on climate change and extreme weather events at a level of detail that was previously out of reach. As a result, the computing and data handling needs of DestinE are unparalleled. Pre-exascale and exascale supercomputers are essential to support these highly demanding computational workloads. For a detailed explanation of supercomputers, read our explainer “Supercomputers: Decoding the Science”.  

This is only made possible through the strategic access granted by the European Commission through the EuroHPC JU. As a joint initiative of the European Union, European countries and private partners, EuroHPC is building a world-class European supercomputing ecosystem which is capable of supporting some of the most ambitious scientific projects.

A European supercomputing ecosystem 

DestinE and EuroHPC represent a unique European effort bringing together infrastructure, expertise and investment across the continent. By granting DestinE access to several of the world’s largest supercomputers, EuroHPC enables the digital twins to produce weather, climate and impact sector information at scales at which the impacts of extreme events and climate change are observed.

DestinE is currently supported by five EuroHPC systems: 

• LUMI, hosted by the CSC – IT Center for Science in Finland  

• MareNostrum 5, hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain 

• Leonardo, hosted by Cineca in Italy 

• Meluxina, hosted by Luxprovide in Luxembourg 

• JUPITER, hosted by Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany 

The latest addition, JUPITER, marks a major milestone for European computing. As Europe’s first exascale supercomputer, it was ranked fifth in the TOP500 list in June 2026. 

Together, these systems give DestinE access to a distributed European supercomputing capacity that matches the scale of its scientific ambition and strengthens Europe’s ability to deliver advanced climate and weather information. 

Scaling Earth-system science to unprecedented levels 

The digital infrastructure underpinning the DestinE system is one of the key factors to its success. By leveraging EuroHPC resources, DestinE’s Digital Twin Engine enables end-to-end workflows that now regularly produce climate and extreme-weather information at globally 5 km and regionally 500m resolution, generating up to 1 simulated year per day of new data. 

This capability is enabling new scientific and service-driven advances. The latest released set of Climate DT simulations includes both global multi-decadal simulations and so-called ‘storyline’ simulations of weather events that happened between 2017 and 2026. These simulations readily connect kilometre-scale models, impact-sector applications and user- or AI-defined workflows. This breakthrough has only been possible thanks to strategic access to the EuroHPC supercomputers.  

Accelerating innovation with AI 

In addition, DestinE harnesses EuroHPC and digital twin data to build new AI-driven Earth system components. Machine learning (ML)-driven models and AI-based software solutions are enhancing DestinE’s ability to quantify uncertainty in digital twin simulations and to improve the interactivity of the DestinE system. These advances also depend on the powerful supercomputing infrastructure provided by EuroHPC. 

Early machine-learning-based prototypes for land, sea ice, waves, hydrology and the ocean are already delivering impressive advances. The development of these components is supported by Anemoi, a portable, scalable open-source framework developed by ECMWF together with national meteorological services across Europe.  

Anemoi supports the development of AI-ready datasets and accelerates training and inference on EuroHPC systems. Its portability also allows models to be trained and deployed across different EuroHPC systems and, increasingly, Europe’s emerging AI factories 

The impact of this work has been recognised internationally. In 2025 Anemoi has been awarded with the “Best Use of AI Methods for Augmenting HPC applications” at the 2025 HPCwire awards. In addition, the work of DestinE using EuroHPC has been awarded twice at the HPCwire awards 2024 for its innovative use of high-performance computing. In 2024, DestinE received the award for “Best use of HPC in Physical Sciences” and the Climate DT was honoured with the award for “Top HPC-Enabled Scientific Achievement”.  

These awards highlight the scientific and technological breakthroughs that are being achieved through the combination of European supercomputing infrastructure, advanced Earth-system models and cutting-edge AI technologies.

Destination Earth and EuroHPC: turning supercomputing into societal value 

The strategic partnership between DestinE and EuroHPC shows how European cooperation can turn world-class supercomputing into operational capability and societal value. EuroHPC provides the computing backbone needed to run DestinE’s digital twins and AI developments at scale, while DestinE turns this infrastructure into trusted weather and climate information for policy, preparedness, adaptation and downstream innovation.

This partnership also strengthens the EuroHPC ecosystem itself. As one of Europe’s largest and most demanding Earth-system applications, DestinE helps mature the practical use of EuroHPC systems for complex simulations, large-scale data flows, AI training and end-to-end digital twin workflows. It also provides a concrete example of how European supercomputing investments can support climate resilience, trustworthy AI, industrial innovation and technological sovereignty.

With the support of EuroHPC, DestinE helps users better understand the impacts of climate change and explore bespoke future scenarios to strengthen resilience to weather- and climate-related risks. Through continued access to world-leading supercomputing and advanced Earth-system science, Europe is making available an expanded set of tools that complements existing weather and climate capabilities and supports climate adaptation for the decades ahead.