DKRZ to Feature Presentations and Mini-Symposia at PASC 2026

The international conference took place from June 29 to July 1, 2026, in Bern, Switzerland, and brought together more than 400 researchers, developers, and users from the fields of HPC, machine learning, and data science. The focus was on new approaches, technologies, and applications for scientific computing and data-intensive research. The DKRZ presented on software development, performance portability, precision optimization, and data management for Earth system models.

At the “Open(ing) Development” mini-symposium, organized by Dr. Jan-Frederik Engels, Ralf Müller spoke about experiences and challenges in opening up the software development of the ICON model.

Dr. Georgiana Mania co-chaired the mini-symposium “Emerging Paradigms for Performance Portability in Earth-System Modeling” with Dr. Xavier Lapillone (MeteoSchweiz). In his presentation “Co-Designing Performance Portability for ICON: An OpenACC to Kokkos Journey,” Dr. Pradipta Samanta presented concepts for porting the ICON model to various HPC architectures.

Another mini-symposium, “Single and Reduced Precision for Weather and Climate Models,” was organized by Dr. Claudia Frauen together with Dr. Balthasar Reuter (ECMWF). During the session, Dylan Kierans presented the paper “Reducing and Validating Precision in the ICON Model” and explained how the targeted use of reduced numerical precision can increase computing power and energy efficiency without compromising the scientific quality of the simulations.

In addition, Niclas Schroeter presented a talk titled “In-Situ Data Analysis Meets Computational Storage Devices,” in which he discussed work on analyzing simulation data during ongoing computational processes as well as the use of new storage technologies.

With his poster “Coupling a km-Scale Earth System Model to Hierarchical Output for an Analysis-Ready Dataset,” Dr. Nils-Arne Dreier won the Best Poster Prize at PASC 2026. The award recognized the work on the efficient provision of analysis-ready datasets from high-resolution Earth system simulations—and perhaps also the tongue-in-cheek description of Hiopy written in poetic form (see textbox).

Petabytes of data, a digital tide,
Where climate insights often hide.
Too vast to move, too slow to read,
A faster workflow is what we need.

Meet Hiopy, the bridge to the cloud,
Making ESM outputs clear and proud.
From HEALPix grids to Zarr's lean art,
It breaks the bottlenecks right from the start.

No more delays, no manual chore,
Just a line of Python to open the door.
Come to my poster, and you will see
How petabyte data flows easy and free!

(Original by Nils-Arne Dreier)

The presentations at PASC 2026 highlight the DKRZ’s broad involvement in the further development of software for climate and Earth system research—ranging from open development processes to performance portability and precision optimization, as well as data management and HPC infrastructures.

For more information, visit the conference website: https://www.pasc-conference.org/

 Photos from PASC 2026: https://pasc-conference.org/editions/pasc26/photo-gallery/