A synergy between research, supercomputing, and industry to strengthen Europe's role in developing digital models for solid Earth sciences. The project will integrate high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, energy efficiency, and advanced services for research and society.
The National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (INGV), with her Section of Pisa, will coordinate the European project ChEESE-Factory – Centre of Excellence for Exascale in Solid Earth, a new initiative dedicated to the development of advanced computing codes, software infrastructures and HPC/AI services for the study of solid Earth processes and natural hazards.
The coordination entrusted to the INGV represents a highly prestigious achievement for the Institute and for the Italian geophysical community. It means take a leading role in defining next-generation European scientific software infrastructures, in a strategic sector for understanding natural processes, mitigating risks and supporting decision-making in emergencies.
The project was funded under the highly competitive EuroHPC Joint Undertaking “HPC Centers of Excellence and HPC Lighthouse Codes”, which provides for an indicative number of only 10 Community Centres of Excellence that can be funded throughout Europe. The initiative aims to support scientific communities capable of developing highly scalable applications, optimized for exascale and post-exascale, integrating new artificial intelligence capabilities, energy efficiency, training and collaboration with the European HPC ecosystem..
“The coordination of ChEESE-Factory represents a milestone of great importance for our Institute and a recognition of the quality of the research that INGV has been carrying out for years in the field of numerical modeling, supercomputing and computational geosciences", declares Fabio Florindo, President of the INGV. "Leading one of the European-funded EuroHPC Centers of Excellence means directly contributing to the development of future European scientific infrastructures and strengthening Italy's role in major international research programs.".
ChEESE-Factory was born as an evolution of the path started with the ChEESE and ChEESE-2P projects, with the aim of consolidating European leadership in scientific computing applied to solid Earth sciences. The project focuses on the development of flagship codes, i.e. community reference software for the simulation of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and complex geodynamic processes. These codes will be refined for EuroHPC infrastructures, integrating elements of artificial intelligence, scientific machine learning and massive simulations. The technological offering will also include services urgent computing, FAIR-compliant datasets, and advanced probabilistic forecasting systems.
The consortium brings together 18 partner organizations from 8 European countries, involving 29 research institutions and over 40 specialized research groups. The Italian component is strong: in addition to INGV, CINECA participates (Italy's main supercomputing center, which hosts the European supercomputer Leonardo) e Intecs Technologies Spa, a private industrial partner specializing in software technologies and high-reliability systems.
"ChEESE-Factory aims to transform the scientific codes developed by the community into real European infrastructures: robust, documented, scalable, interoperable tools accessible to researchers, computing centers and stakeholders”, points out Mattia de' Michieli Vitturi, senior researcher at the Pisa Section of the INGV and project coordinator. "A particularly important aspect will be the focus on energy efficiency. Reducing the energy impact of numerical simulations is no longer just a technical objective, but a scientific, environmental, and social priority..
“In these years we have demonstrated that theand high-performance computing technologies can make a fundamental contribution to the mitigation of natural risks, in terms of simulation speed ("Urgent Computing"), scenario accuracy, and probabilistic quantification of uncertainties. With this new initiative, we will explore the convergence of high-performance computing and artificial intelligence.", He declares Tomaso Esposti Ongaro, Director of the Pisa Section of the INGV.
Un a central element will be the construction of an ecosystem of services to support scientific codes: community support, advanced training, access to HPC/AI workflows and enhancement of the Simulation Data Lake of CINECA. The project also includes activities of capacity building, including the creation of a permanent Summer School, to help cultivate a new generation of researchers, developers, and expert users.
With ChEESE-Factory, INGV and the consortium strengthen Europe's role in developing advanced computational tools to address the major scientific and societal challenges of the future.
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ChEESE-FACTORY | INGV will coordinate the European project for supercomputing and artificial intelligence applied to Earth sciences