CERFACS bringing its expertise in High-Performance Computing

What is PHIDIAS and why it is important?

To process large volumes of data, as the spatial and environmental ones spanning the earth’s surface, the atmosphere and the oceans we need to use High-Performance Computing (HPC). In this framework, PHIDIAS aims to develop and realize a set interdisciplinary services and tools of based HPC for Earth System Sciences to exploit large data sets of public European interest provided by satellite observation of Earth, and provide fair access to these processed datasets and value-added services.

The project is carried out by a committed Consortium of 13 partners from 5 European Countries, led by CINES, the French National Computing Centre for Higher Education. Among these partners there is CERFACS, a basic and applied research center specialized in modeling and numerical simulation, which will bring its strong expertise in on-demand data processing and portal interfaces.

CERFACS bringing its expertise in High-Performance Computing

We spoke to Christian Pagé, Research Engineer and Project Manager at CERFACS, who reported two Use Cases that exemplify which challenges PHIDIAS is trying to overcome. For example, after an extreme weather event that could be attributed to climate change impacts, an analysis will be performed to assess if this event can be attributed to climate change or not. Another possible Use Case could be the analysis of long time series of satellite data for the purpose of climate model verification.

Therefore, thanks to these new services, the scientific communities will have easier data access and climate change researchers will be able to use satellite data and Earth Observations data.

Christian Pagé ends by inviting to “dive into the convergence between data and HPC for the benefit not only of the researchers, but of the wider society as well”.