An Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) delegation recently participated in a training course titled “HPC and natural hazards: modelling tsunamis and volcanic plumes using European flagship codes”, organized by the EU-funded ChEESE (Center of Excellence for Exascale in Solid Earth) in collaboration with the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE).
Held on December 2-5, 2019 at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the course focused on modelling two of the highest impact natural hazards: volcanic eruptions and tsunamis. The objective was to introduce participants to the use of HPC flagship codes Tsunami-HySEA, ASHEE and FALL3D through several hands-on sessions, presented by ChEESE partners from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the University of Malaga and the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.
The objective of ChEESE is to prepare 10 flagship codes on seismic, tsunami and magnetohydrodynamics modelling which will enable services such as urgent computing, hazard assessment and early warning forecast for Exascale supercomputing. Project coordinator Arnau Folch said, “We were interested in organizing this training course because we wanted to share our knowledge of using HPC codes to model natural hazards. Computational geoscience is becoming more and more important in mitigating their effects and researchers are becoming interested in this area. We were very happy to host the ASEAN delegates along with our usual European participants. We hope that they have learned a lot.”
The ASEAN participants, who were comprised of scientists, civil protection officers and key thought leaders, joined the course through the Enhanced Regional EU-ASEAN Dialogue Instrument (E-READI) program. E-READI established an EU-ASEAN HPC Research and Innovation Policy Exchange Platform which identified the HPC and natural hazards training course as a medium for EU-ASEAN collaboration.
The next ChEESE and PRACE training course, titled "Tools and techniques to quickly improve performances of HPC applications in Solid Earth", will take place in CINECA in Rome, Italy on May 27-29, 2020. An announcement will be made once registration opens.
