The European Commission’s Directorate‑General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (Connect) is organising a workshop exploring the synergies between cloud, extreme scale data & high performance computing infrastructure and machine-learning methodologies. The aim is to investigate options to underpin an efficient European Earth system modelling capability in the future and a coherent support to EU sustainability policy making.
Extreme natural phenomena – such as floods, droughts, wind storms, earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunamis – and the escalating impact of climate change – such as desertification, ice-sheet and glacier melting, sea-level rise – dramatically affect all sectors of society. There is a need for effective mechanisms dealing with future change and extremes at scales that are relevant for decision making in countries, regions, cities and large, medium and small businesses. This improved understanding needs to be combined with attractive and intuitive decision-support tools for the use of European Commission policy services and possibly national, regional, local authorities in Member States.
Today’s lack of such an ability originates from the inherent physical complexity of the Earth system and its underlying processes, the lack of sufficient and accurate observational data, the lack of accurate models to simulate the system’s complexity and, last but not least, limitations in available European High Performance Computing (HPC) and data management capabilities. Europe's future capability to reliably predict and monitor Earth’s ecosystems and environmental extremes as well as their impacts on society at scales that are relevant for national, regional and local decision-makers will rely on the successful integration of edge and exascale computing and real-time exploitation of pervasive environmental and socio-economic data.
The objective of this full-day event is to map the capabilities & initiatives of major stakeholders in this area and explore how key European initiatives can come together and underpin a world-class data and digital infrastructure related to reliable Earth system and extremes' modelling for policy support.
During the event, among other, the role of the following European initiatives will be discussed: the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), the Euro HPC Joint Undertaking, the European Connectivity Initiative GÉANT as well as Artificial Intelligence methodologies.
More information
The event will take place in Brussels on 27 November 2019. It is public and open to all interested stakeholders upon registration. Registration via e-mail to [email protected].
Further information on background and objective of the workshop can be obtained from Andreas Veispak or Christian Kirchsteiger.