Dr. Peter Bauer, ECMWF
In this keynote from HiPEAC’s Computing Systems Week in Edinburgh, Peter Bauer from ECMWF explains how Europe is a global leader in weather and climate prediction, and how HPC, big data, and artificial intelligence are crucial to cementing this leadership.
Weather and climate prediction are high-performance computing application with outstanding societal and economic impact ranging from the daily decision-making of citizens to that of civil services for emergency response, and from predicting weather drivers in food, agriculture and energy markets as well as for risk and loss management by insurances. Forecasts are based on millions of observations made every day around the globe and physically based numerical models that represent processes acting on scales from hundreds of metres to thousands of kilometres in the atmosphere, the ocean, the land surface and the cryosphere. Forecast production and product dissemination to users is always time critical and forecast output data volumes already reach petabytes per week. Meeting the future requirements for forecast reliability and timeliness needs 100-1000 times bigger high-performance computing and data management resources than today – towards what’s generally called ‘exascale’. To meet these needs, the weather and climate prediction community is undergoing one of its biggest revolutions since its foundation in the early 20th century.
This revolution encompasses a fundamental redesign of mathematical algorithms and numerical methods, the adaptation to new programming models, the implementation of dynamic and resilient workflows and the efficient post-processing and handling of big data. Due to these enormous computing and data challenges, artificial intelligence methods offer significant potential for gaining efficiency and for making optimal use of the generated information for European society.
Dr Peter Bauer is the Deputy Director of the Research Department at ECMWF in the UK and heads the ECMWF Scalability Program. He obtained his PhD degree in meteorology from the University in Hamburg, Germany. During his career, he was awarded post-doctoral and research fellowships working at NOAA and NASA in the US and IPSL in France. He is an international fellow of the German Helmholtz Society. He led a research team on satellite meteorology at DLR in Germany before joining ECMWF in 2000. He has been a member of advisory committees for national weather services, the World Meteorological Organization and European space agencies. He is coordinating the FET-HPC projects ESCAPE and ESCAPE-2, and the recent ExtremeEarth proposal for European Flagships.
