ESiWACE2 Sustainability Plan (D7.8)

The European Centre of Excellence in Weather and Climate in Europe (ESiWACE) is an activity that
has been funded by the European Commission since 2016 under the HPC Centre of Excellence
(CoE) programme with two subsequent projects, ESiWACE and ESiWACE2, aiming to develop and
promote exascale-ready weather and climate codes, address skills gaps, and bring together the
community working on these problems.

ESiWACE2 terminates at the end of 2022. However, there are ongoing requirements, which are
diverse, and range from specific technology objectives to ensuring that there are ongoing
mechanisms of formal and informal collaboration. It will remain important for the European
weather and climate science community to work together on developing and evolving codes,
infrastructure and services suitable for the exascale era. In this context, the European community
includes the full spectrum of existing partners, including those who are partners in the ECMWF
who are not parties to all of Digital Europe or Horizon Europe funding.

The community intends to build on other initiatives to establish a self-funded coordination entity
whose remit will include delivering on a set of their requirements. However, it remains the case
that project funding (both national and from the European Commission) will be indispensable to
deliver the scientific and technical progress necessary to fulfil the aspirations of society to exploit
exascale (and post-exascale) computing to provide the weather and climate information that our
society urgently needs.