On November 26th in Rome, our Jacopo Nespolo (tech lead) and Alberto Pastorutti (system operations lead) delivered intensive training on the operational oceanography re-engineering work eXact lab is carrying out for ISPRA together with partners OGS and CINECA within the MER project (Marine Ecosystem Restoration, lots B32-B35).

MER is the largest marine project within Italy’s National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR, funded by the European Union), led by ISPRA with €400 million in funding from the Ministero dell’Ambiente e della Sicurezza Energetica. The project focuses on seabed restoration, marine habitat protection, ecosystem observation systems, and comprehensive coastal mapping across Italian water. 🌍

The actions eXact lab is involved in deal with forecasting and re-analysis of the biogeochemical properties of the Italian seas at unprecedented resolution of ~500m, with some super high resolution areas resolved to ~100m. We normally face either extremely large amounts of data or high HPC loads, and often you have to choose one and sacrifice the other, said Jacopo Nespolo. This project contains both, which made striking the right balance particularly challenging. The system we devised uses a cloud service for workflow orchestration and monitoring of the operational forecasting system, whilst
leveraging CINECA’s Leonardo supercomputer for the HPC workloads. The heterogeneous nature of the project poses significant stress on networks and IO, noted Alberto Pastorutti. We had to be smart in deciding where and how to deploy each component involved.

The training was attended by a diverse audience of scientists and technologists from several ARPA agencies across Italy, ENEA, ISPRA, and Agenzia ItaliaMeteo. As scientists ourselves, we found a common language to bridge the technical aspects of our work with the audience’s domain knowledge. We adopted a hands-on approach, which sparked engaging discussions ranging from technical implementation details to high-level perspectives on the evolution of operational oceanography and data dissemination.

The new high resolution data will contribute to more accurate monitoring of the health of the Italian Seas, an objective that aligns with eXact lab’s core values as a benefit company.

We thank the colleagues Stefano Querin (project coordinator) and Stefano Piani from OGS, Fabio Di Sante from CINECA and ISPRA’s Antonello Bruschi and francesca catini (project officers) for making this event possible and helping us make it a success. We look forward to further fruitful collaborations with the meteorology and oceanography community.

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Activities developed in the framework of the MER (Marine Ecosystem Restoration) project, funded by the NextGenerationEU programme (Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan, investment M2C4 – I3.5).