OBJECTIVE

Technological advances in high performance computing are creating exciting new oppor-tunities that move well beyond improving the precision of simulation models. The use of extreme computing in real-time applications with high velocity data and live analytics is within reach. The availability of fast growing social and sensor networks raises new possi-bilities in monitoring, assessing and predicting environmental, social and economic incidents as they happen. Add in grand challenges in data fusion, analysis and visualization, and extreme computing hardware has an increas-ingly essential role in enabling efficient pro-cessing workflows for huge heterogeneous data streams.

VESTEC will create the software solutions needed to realise this vision for urgent deci-sion making in various fields with high impact for the European community. VESTEC will build a flexible toolchain to combine multiple data sources, efficiently extract essential features, enable flexible scheduling and inter-active supercomputing, and realise 3D visuali-zation environments for interactive explora-tions by stakeholders and decision makers. VESTEC will develop and evaluate methods and interfaces to integrate high-performance data analytics processes into running simula-tions and real-time data environments. Inter-active ensemble management will launch new simulations for new data, building up statisti-cally more and more accurate pictures of emerging, time-critical phenomena. Innova-tive data compression approaches, based on topological feature extraction and data sam-pling, will result in considerable reductions in storage and processing demands by discard-ing domain-irrelevant data.

Three emerging use cases will demonstrate the immense benefit for urgent decision making: wildfire monitoring and forecasting; analysis of risk associated with mosquito-borne diseases; and the effects of space weather on technical supply chains. VESTEC brings together experts in each domain to address the challenges holistically.