ESCAPE-2 will support emerging extreme-scale markets by investigating specific models of heterogeneous architectures for one of the most challenging scientific applications. The specific complexity of weather and climate forecast production workflows, engrained in the heritage of existing (legacy) applications, requires a new approach for often conflicting programming models required to efficiently use more conventional and novel low-energy processor types. Specific to Earth-system prediction are the fundamentally large memory requirements, the combination of global and local stencil-type operations, and the very high flop rates needed for completing high-resolution complex sets of equations in prescribed strict wall-clock time limits with highest possible reliability. ESCAPE-2 will produce a template for mathematics/algorithms in concert with domain specific programming models to be run on a diverse range of HPC architectures applicable to a wide community in weather and climate forecasting.

The involvement of industrial partners such as BULL – currently providing the bulk of the European HPC systems – and other vendors through a network of accessible HPC infrastructures, indicates the significant economic potential for HPC in weather and climate prediction. The complementary setup of research and innovation activities in this community, with a tight link to innovative hardware developments through co-design projects (e.g. EuroEXA, NextGenIO), supports the important role of weather and climate prediction for defining the development of excellence in European HPC and data handling technology, as well as the role of ESCAPE-2 in defining a representative and community-wide application benchmark.