SOCCO at the km-Scale Global Modelling Summit in Hamburg

SOCCO's Dr Nicolette Chang and PhD student Tumelo Moalusi travelled to Hamburg in July for the km-Scale Global Modelling Summit 2026. There, Tumelo presented an assessment of what kilometre-scale climate modelling would demand of South Africa's national supercomputer.

The summit drew around 350 international experts in high-resolution Earth system modelling. It was coordinated at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, and set out to review what the first generation of global km-scale models has taught the community. Tumelo presented his PhD research comparing the computing needs of global km-scale simulations with the capacity of Lengau, the flagship cluster at the CHPC (about 1 petaflop across roughly 33,000 cores). For SOCCO, the Summit’s discussions strengthens our case for targeted regional models.

Nicolette's trip was funded by The National Institute for Theoretical and Computational Sciences (NITheCS).