The most relevant international research programmes supporting weather and climate prediction are WWRP and WCRP, which are administered by WMO. WWRP aims to advance society's ability to cope with high impact weather through research focused on improving the accuracy, lead time and utilization of weather prediction while the WCRP mission is to facilitate analysis and prediction of Earth-system variability and change for use in an increasing range of practical applications of direct relevance, benefit and value to society. Both programmes foster future high-resolution model development to which scalability is recognized as a major impediment . The recently published WWRP strategy includes, for the first time, a specific action area on new technologies which includes HPC. This has been due to ECMWF's involvement in several WWRP and WCRP coordination activities and highlights the importance of this consortium's involvement in promoting the European HPC strategy in international (here WMO) programmes.

The collaboration with vendors and the important research on weather and climate domain-specific languages in ESCAPE-2 offers the opportunity for programming model co-design, adding leverage at the boundary between hardware and application. The project will establish whether it is possible to retain performance portability with an open-source, technically supported DSL toolchain including traceable source-to-source translation, thus promoting a unified approach in the community. Programming models are seen as a key cornerstone to unlocking performance and performance portability at the same time. ESCAPE-2 is the only project where the responsibility for this development is strongly supported by the entire weather and climate prediction community.

ESCAPE-2 will pioneer a new type of domain-specific benchmark standard (HPCW) that offers more realistic hardware performance assessment compared to existing general-purpose benchmarks such as HPL and HPCG. Notably, key weather and climate prediction codes operate at 5% sustained performance or less, and HPCW prepares the way to establish benchmark standards that vendors can work with to extract efficiency rates that are higher than today.