The Computational Earth Sciences (CES) group is a multidisciplinary team within the Earth Sciences Department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) that develops, maintains, and optimises computational applications, tools and infrastructures supporting environmental and climate research.

CES brings together computer scientists and engineers who work closely with other scientific teams to ensure efficient, scalable, and sustainable use of Information Technology (IT) resources, with a special focus on High-Performance Computing (HPC). The group’s mission is to enable and accelerate scientific discovery in Earth system modelling, atmospheric processes, ocean information systems, and air quality studies through advanced computing, data management, and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques.

The group’s activities focus on the following areas:

• Efficient use of HPC resources: Design, implement, and maintain computational methodologies and frameworks that enable Earth researchers to perform large-scale simulations and data analyses effectively. This includes ensuring adequate storage and computational resources.

• Software optimization and HPC adaptation: Research, develop and adapt scientific software and Earth system models to run efficiently on current and next-generation HPC architectures, moving towards exascale computing. This includes profiling, parallelization, GPU adaptation and co-design for novel technologies.

• Data management and dissemination: Build and maintain frameworks for storing, standardizing, and disseminating model outputs and datasets generated by the Earth Sciences Department, promoting open science and interoperability with external research and service communities.

• Computational workflows: Develop automated workflows and workflow management software for running complex Earth system model experiments across diverse HPC environments, ensuring portability, scalability, and efficiency through robust software engineering, collaboration, and continuous training.

• Scientific software development: Design, implement, and maintain efficient, portable, and well-documented tools for data processing, diagnostics, and visualization, ensuring high performance, scalability, and accessibility to support Earth system modelling, analysis, and collaborative research.

• IT infrastructure: Maintain an IT infrastructure that ensures an efficient working environment for the development of the BSC-ES research and services, including the provision of sufficient storage to reduce this specific vulnerability of the department.

• Good practices and collaborative workflows: Provide guidance on coding standards, version control, testing, and collaborative software development to improve productivity, ensure reproducibility, and facilitate onboarding of new team members.

• Training and technical support: Deliver continuous training and technical assistance to researchers and IT staff to ensure effective and sustainable use of computational resources and tools.

• Integration of Artificial Intelligence: Explore and apply AI and machine learning methods to solve Earth Sciences problems, such as speeding up numerical simulations, improving predictive skill, and creating human-machine interfaces. Additionally, support data-driven research in climate and atmospheric sciences.

• European integration and computational excellence: Actively engage in European and international research initiatives to foster collaboration, excellence, and impact in the field of computational Earth system sciences. Contribute to Horizon Europe projects, Centres of Excellence, and related communities to strengthen the group’s role within the European HPC and climate research ecosystem.

The CES group is led by Mario Acosta and Miguel Castrillo, and is organised into four specialised teams and eight units, each addressing complementary aspects of computational Earth sciences:

• Artificial Intelligence Team (AIT)
• Data and Diagnostics Team (DDT)
• High Performance Computing for Earth Science Team (HPC4ES)
• Models and Workflows Team (MWT)

• Climate Model Development and HPC Adaptation
• EC-Earth
• Emissions
• GPU Computing
• MONARCH Development and HPC Adaptation
• Numerical Development and Scientific Evaluation
• R Tools
• Web Development

• List of Group Members

In this section, one can find some guidelines when starting working in CES

Department Git projects

See peer publications here

See other publications here

See posters here

See information about the invited talks here

See the technical memoranda here

See events and visits (co-)organised by CES https://earth.bsc.es/wiki/doku.php?id=namespace:page#events here

• Template BSC and CES
• Template CES

• 2017
  
• 2018
  
• 2019
  
• 2020
  
• 2021
  
• 2022
  
• 2023
  
• 2024
  
• 2025
  
• 2026

In the CES group, we are not only computer guys and girls, we are also cooks! Take a look!