High Performance Climate Research

Modeling the future of our changing climate gives scientists a picture of what the future might look like, information that’s crucial for policy makers at all levels. Detailed modeling requires considerable computing power, making a collaboration between ICTP and the Italian supercomputing centre CINECA an ongoing success story for climate research and global research collaboration. 

Many climate models consider the whole planet, projecting how the Earth’s climate will change in the future. But climate-related decisions to reduce and adapt to a changing climate are made on the country, region, and city level. That’s where regional climate models come in, incorporating more of Earth’s complexity to provide details of how the climate will change at the local scale, affecting for example extreme events relevant for public health, economies, and many more facets of life. 

Several ICTP climatologists are involved in a worldwide collaborative project, Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX), focusing on regional climate downscaling: moving from models that consider the planet in blocks of 100 kilometers to regional models that consider variation across distances of kilometers scale. “Downscaling is what is needed to estimate the impact of climate change on hazards and risks in different places – what each locality is dealing with,” says Erika Coppola, one of the ICTP climatologists involved in CORDEX. 

But zooming in and including many more regional details means a huge increase in data: running regional climate models and storing their outputs require a lot of computing power and storage space. That’s why ICTP has partnered with CINECA, one of the top supercomputing centers in the world, located in Bologna, Italy. “Its resources are orders of magnitude bigger than what we have here,” says Ivan Girotto, a high performance computing specialist at ICTP. “CINECA has been supportive: more resources were rapidly made available when ICTP got requests to run models and scenarios for countries that don’t have computing resources. The CORDEX project ultimately required twice the amount of computing power and storage space than originally planned.” 

“ICTP is one of the few groups around the world with access to considerable computing resources working on the CORDEX project,” says Coppola. “With models downscaling three different global climate models, for nine regional domains, and two scenarios, covering one hundred and thirty years - 1970-2100, this project requires considerable computing power.” While ICTP has some computing resources locally, the partnership with CINECA has been key to doing this work, say both Coppola and Girotto. With the current ICTP capacities, it would have been impossible to run the same amount of simulations in the time available.

“ICTP has partnerships with groups in Beijing, Hong Kong and the US, but a big load has been on us for running domains for developing countries that don’t have sufficient computing resources,” says Coppola. For example, the models for the Central and South America  domains were set up and run through ICTP, and the same was done for Africa. “CINECA has been very flexible and helpful with this,” Coppola says. 

CINECA also has helped ICTP by applying to become part of the Earth System Grid Federation (ESGF) network, a collaboration that maintains software and computing infrastructure for earth systems science data. As an ESGF node, CINECA manages and hosts climate data produced by ICTP’s Earth System Physics group, providing it open-access for scientists all over the world. “The ESGF network includes frameworks for browsing and analyzing distributed data without downloading, which can be a major hurdle for scientists in developing countries with slow or limited internet,” says Girotto. Coppola adds, “As an ESGF node, CINECA provides a guarantee of data quality, uniform formatting, all sorts of things that make it much easier to use and compare with other data.” 

"For CINECA, the collaboration with ICTP, one of our major stakeholders, is of strategic importance,” says Sanzio Bassini, the Director the Department of Supercalcuations, Applications, & Innovation at CINECA. “As the keystone of the main national big data hub in Bologna, which also includes the presence of the ECMWF data center and the next settlement of the Italian Meteorological Agency, for CINECA the CORDEX and ESGF projects constitute a starting point for the forthcoming indispensable joint development activities regarding the issues of climate change and the study of the relative impacts, one of the highest priorities of interest."

Earth System Physics is not the only section at ICTP that uses CINECA’s resources: scientists in the Centre's Condensed Matter and Statistical Physics section as well as several in the High Energy Physics section also use CINECA. Their calculations range from cosmological simulations that solve numerically relativistic field theories, to quantum simulations of the electronic structure in materials and classical molecular dynamics. The computing resources have been a particular boon to Earth systems physics, however, as climate science is often a computing-heavy endeavor. “We finished all the simulations in time to make the data available to be part of the next IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) report on the state of the climate,” says Coppola, thanks to the collaboration with CINECA. ICTP’s CORDEX project data is now fully published on the CINECA ESGF node, and overall CORDEX results will be featured in a coming special issue of Climate Dynamics. 

Having these results of widespread downscaling ready for the next report means that policy makers can have hazards projections at local high resolution scale, says Coppola, and this is much more relevant for people who have to work to adapt to climate change locally. Computing resources are a big part of the downscaling work. “Thanks to the resources CINECA made available, ICTP scientists will have used tens of millions of core hours over the last three years, with raw data occupying several petabytes, a significant amount of the storage CINECA has available,” says Girotto. “It is a very important part of the climate science going on at ICTP.”  

This collaboration between ICTP and CINECA has helped produce data and make it available for scientists all over the world to use for further research. For climate science and beyond, the CORDEX project is important for policy decisions relating to floods, droughts, disease spread, public health, agriculture, and many more, especially in the still-developing countries that will be hardest hit by climate change.

—- Kelsey Calhoun