HPC Status Conference: DKRZ showcases developments from Chatbots to Exascale

Organized by the Gauss Alliance, the Georg August University of Göttingen, the GWDG, and in cooperation with the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (Bundesministerium für Forschung, Technologie und Raumfahrt, short: BMFTR), the three-day conference once again provided a central platform for interdisciplinary exchange on high-performance computing (HPC) in Germany.

On the first day of the conference, Dr. Christopher Kadow, head of the department Data Analysis, delivered the keynote "AI and Climate Research – The Chatbot That Writes Poems Analyzes Climate Data on HPCs?!" In it, he highlighted the opportunities and challenges of using artificial intelligence (AI) in climate research. He highlighted how closely the two fields of AI and HPC are linked and how this leads to new research approaches.

The following day, the focus was on the SCALEXA and GreenHPC projects funded by the BMFTR. Julius Plehn presented results on an energy-efficient setup of the climate and weather model ICON on heterogeneous HPC systems. Dr. Panagiotis Adamidis then demonstrated how the performance and scalability of ICON can be further improved with a view to future Exascale systems. This work makes an important contribution to the future-proof and resource-efficient use of complex climate models.

There is growing interest in the HPC community in benchmarks that are more closely aligned with real-world applications. Climate models, such as the High Performance Climate & Weather Benchmark (HPCW), could play a complementary role in evaluating the efficiency of high-performance computers in the long term.

The 2025 HPC Status Conference demonstrated the strong presence of the DKRZ, with its projects and experts, within the German HPC community and the high importance of climate modeling.