ESCAPE-2 stands for Energy-efficient SCalable Algorithms for weather and climate Prediction at Exascale and is the follow-on initiative of the ESCAPE project.

ESCAPE-2 will develop world-class, extreme-scale computing capabilities for European operational numerical weather and climate prediction systems. It continues the pioneering work of the ESCAPE project. The project aims to attack all three sources of enhanced computational performance at once, namely (i) developing and testing bespoke numerical methods that optimally trade off accuracy, resilience and performance, (ii) developing generic programming approaches that ensure code portability and performance portability, (iii) testing performance on HPC platforms offering different processor technologies.

ESCAPE-2 will prepare weather and climate domain benchmarks that will allow a much more realistic assessment of application specific performance on large HPC systems  than current generic benchmarks such as HPL and HPCG. These benchmarks are specifically geared towards the pre-exascale and exascale HPC infrastructures that the European Commission and Member States will invest in through the European Commission Joint Undertaking. 

ESCAPE-2 also combines generic uncertainty quantification tools for high-performance computing originating from the energy sector with ensemble based weather and climate models to  quantify the effect of model and data related uncertainties on forecasting – a capability, which weather and climate prediction has pioneered since the 1960s. This collaboration combines user-friendly tools from one community with scientific expert knowledge from another community to achieve economy of scales beyond the scope of each domain.

ECMWF’s partners in the project are Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum GMBH, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Foerderung der Wissenschaften eV, Eidgenoessisches Department des Inneren, Barcelona Supercomputing Center, Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique et aux Energies Alternatives, Loughborough University, Institut Royal Meteorologique de Belgique, Politecnico di Milano, Danmarks Meteorologiske Institut, Fondazione Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climitici, and, Bull SAS.

ESCAPE-2 is an integral part of the ECMWF Scalability Programme and supports in particular the Polymitos and PantaRhei projects in view of the future dynamical core developments at ECMWF. 

ESCAPE-2 is funded by the European Commission under the Future and Emerging Technologies - High-Performance Computing call for research and innovation actions, grant agreement 800897.