18.06.2024

The Swiss PASC conference (Platform for Advanced Scientific Computing) is one of the most important scientific HPC-conferences worldwide. PASC24 took place from June 3 to 5 in Zurich and welcomed more than 500 international participants covering a wide range of scientific application areas, from basic research in physics or geosciences to computational methods and applied mathematics.

On the opening day of the conference, Dr. Jan Frederik Engels (DKRZ) and Dr. William Sawyer (ETH Zurich/CSCS) organized a mini-symposium that focused on energy efficiency and the carbon footprint of Earth system modelling, which featured an interesting contribution by Dr. Pay Giesselmann (DKRZ). His presentation focused on the hardware and configuration optimizations performed on DKRZ’s supercomputer Levante, together with preliminary findings about the potential of running functional units of modular models that employ the most suitable hardware of a heterogeneous cluster.

Subsequently, Dr. Claudia Frauen (DKRZ) and Dr. Balthasar Reuter (ECMWF) organized a mini-symposium on kilometer-scale weather and climate simulations, and the challenges that such high-resolution computations pose for HPC systems. Speakers from the National Center of Atmospheric Research, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the Finnish IT Center for Science (which operates the LUMI supercomputer) and the ETH Zurich discussed their efforts on approaching the problem from different angles, from implementing python-based domain specific languages to using machine learning for the development of a digital twin. 

Finally, software engineering aspects with focus on the efficiency of high-resolution weather and climate simulations were presented in the mini-symposium organized by Dr. Hendryk Bockelmann (DKRZ) and Dr. Xavier Lapillonne (MeteoSwiss). Dr. Georgiana Mania (DKRZ) discussed preliminary results of prototyping C++ alternatives to Fortran in search for performance portability, while other speakers focused on Python implementations, source-to-source translation tools, but also on the importance of a clear development workflow.

The next PASC conference will take place in Brugg, Switzerland, in mid-June next year.

Copyright: lower photo on the der collage - The pictures are available for download and use under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.