From earthquakes to tsunamis, through volcanic eruptions, supercomputers put their powerful ‘brains’ at the service of emergencies, to provide urgent calculation services, early warning and to assess the danger of relevant geological events. In fact, the second phase of the European ChEESE project has started, a center of excellence for the use of super-computing in Earth sciences, which uses computers capable of processing up to a billion billion mathematical operations per second: ChEESE-2P will be coordinated by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and will be financed by the European Commission and by the funds of the 10 participating countries with approximately 8 million euros. The National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (Ingv) is also participating in the project for Italy.
“The continuation of the ChEESE initiative will further improve the capabilities of the European community working in earth sciences, allowing researchers to enable services related to urgent calculation, early warning and hazard assessment, which can be used by European civil protections”, comments Arnau Folch of Csic and coordinator of the project. “The implementation of ChEESE in real operating environments – adds Folch – has shown that our developments can have a direct impact on the lives of people affected by natural disasters”.
The impact of the initiative has made it possible to establish a winning synergy between research in the geosciences and that of high-performance computing, also giving life to other European projects: an example is DT-GEO, which is creating a ‘digital twin’ of the Earth for natural hazards.
Source: Ansa
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