The Common Cloud Infrastructure (CCI) is a cloud computing based IT infrastructure which has the wide scope to host and serve multiple projects and services offered at ECMWF, such as the European Weather Cloud, the Copernicus Climate Data Store and Atmosphere Data Store.

ECMWF has the mandate to provide a seamless infrastructure and services to all the ECMWF users allowing them to effectively use the computing services and data available in order to improve science and forecasts.

CCI has been setup in the Bologna Data Centre to serve this purpose, together with other ECMWF facilities and services such as the High Performance Computing Facility and the Data Handling System. In the future, such cloud infrastructure is also expected to converge with the High Performance Computing Facility, harmonising the adopted and offered computing solutions.

Main Services

European Weather Cloud

The European Weather Cloud (EWC) is a joint initiative of ECMWF and EUMETSAT with the purpose of providing a community cloud platform built to serve the European Meteorological Infrastructure (EMI) and its users. The EMI comprises ECMWF, EUMETSAT, and the National Meteorological Services of their Member States.

The EWC service consists of a distributed cloud infrastructure jointly provided by ECMWF and EUMETSAT which allows proximate access to both organisations' data resources and services. Users can flexibly deploy their applications and workflows, as well as expose web services next to the data they require, avoiding impractical large transfers over the network.

Since September 2023, and after a Pilot phase running successfully in the Reading Data Centre, the operational EWC service at ECMWF runs on the CCI leveraging its computing and storage resources.

Common Data Store for Copernicus Services

The Common Data Store is the main data storage system for the two Copernicus operational services: the Climate Data Store (CDS) for the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and the Atmosphere Data Store (ADS) for the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS).

Both CDS and ADS are designed to be a one-stop shop for past, present and future information about the climate and atmosphere respectively, providing easy access to a wide range of datasets via a searchable catalogue and an API.

The CCI supports the European Weather Cloud, The Copernicus Data Stores and other applications and services

System Architecture

After a competitive procurement, Kubus LTD, in association with Dell Technologies, StackHPC and Juniper Networks, were commissioned to deliver, install, and operate the hardware and software elements that underpin the CCI.

The service is split into two equal-size production clouds, named CCI1 and CCI2, plus a smaller Test and Validation (TAV) environment. Each production cloud is hosted in an independent computing hall at ECMWF’s datacentre for redundancy and resilience purposes.

In the current configuration, the CCI features 68 Compute nodes, with a total of 19456 cores, and over 117 TiB of memory. This infrastructure also offers access to 32 Nvidia Ampere A100 80 GB GPUs, especially targeting AI/ML users and applications.

Openstack is used to manage those computing capabilities and expose them to the different applications, services and users.

Backing the computing capabilities, approximately 5.5 PiB of usable HDD-backed storage, and around 300 TiB of SSD-backed storage are available on each of the two CCI clouds. Ceph is the storage solution behind it, ensuring scalable and robust access to the data.

This storage capacity is used for both classic block storage by the virtual infrastructure deployed in the cloud, as well as object storage using popular protocols such as Amazon S3 and Openstack Swift.

The overall CCI service is operated by a team of in-house experts, in close collaboration with external partners and vendors.

ECMWF is also an associate member of the Open Infrastructure Foundation, supporting and contributing to the technologies that power this infrastructure.