Exascale Computing and Data Handling: Challenges and Opportunities for Weather and Climate Prediction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The emergence of exascale computing and artificial intelligence offer tremendous potential to significantly advance Earth system prediction capabilities. However, enormous challenges must be overcome to adapt models and prediction systems to use these new technologies effectively. A 2022 WMO report on exascale computing recommends “ urgency in dedicating efforts and attention to disruptions associated with evolving computing technologies that will be increasingly difficult to overcome, threatening continued advancements in weather and climate prediction capabilities .” Further, the explosive growth in data from observations, model and ensemble output, and postprocessing threatens to overwhelm the ability to deliver timely, accurate, and precise information needed for decision-making. Artificial intelligence (AI) offers untapped opportunities to alter how models are developed, observations are processed, and predictions are analyzed and extracted for decision-making. Given the extraordinarily high cost of computing, growing complexity of prediction systems, and increasingly unmanageable amount of data being produced and consumed, these challenges are rapidly becoming too large for any single institution or country to handle. This paper describes key technical and budgetary challenges, identifies gaps and ways to address them, and makes a number of recommendations. Significance Statement Earth system modeling and prediction stands at a crossroad. Exascale computing and artificial intelligence (AI) offer powerful new capabilities to advance Earth system predictions. However, models, assimilation, and data processing systems are increasingly unable to exploit these new technologies due to scientific, software, and computational limitations. Significant changes to the models including algorithms, software, and parallelism are needed to run models efficiently on diverse exascale systems. While AI offers significant potential, it is unclear the degree it can be developed and integrated into existing prediction systems. We recommend models be redesigned, linking science, software, and computing in codesign efforts to fully exploit exascale and AI. Special efforts are needed to recruit, train, and retain a highly skilled, interdisciplinary workforce. Given the high cost, shared computing and data facilities may become necessary.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".