DestinE
ECMWF and Cineca signed a joint agreement to cement the collaboration through the first phase of development of the Destination Earth project.
ECMWF is an independent intergovernmental organization supported by 35 States, and acts both as a research center and a 24/7 operational service, producing and disseminating numerical weather forecasts to its Member States.
Destination Earth (DestinE for short),is an innovative and ambitious project, which aims to develop a digital twin of the planet on a large scale: a tool to monitor and predict the interactions between natural phenomena and human activities.
The initiative is one of the cornerstones of the Green Deal, ma but it is also part of the Digital Strategy, both flagship initiatives of the European Union for the period 2019-2024.
Destination Earth involves cloud-native technology that will operate in a multi-site HPC environment, drawing from ECMWF’s domain-specific technologies and software development.
This innovative setup poses some major scientific and technological challenges where the partnership with Cineca is invaluable, especially in a dynamic and rapidly evolving context such as that of the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking.
As DestinE’s operations intend to connect HPC and cloud-based solutions with different EuroHPC computing centers, and using each different architectures and ecosystems, Cineca and ECMWF teams will ensure they are ready and meets these requirements.
Furthermore, the DestinE codes will be implemented on Leonardo‘s European partition, that with its modular and flexible structure and its hybrid cloud is particularly suited to meet the needs of the project.
The agreement, signed in September 2022 and in force until April 2024, also represents a valid opportunity to strengthen good neighbourly relations: in fact, the new ECMWF data center in Bologna is just a few meters from the Cineca facility housed in the technopole.
