Faster Module Meeting 2025: Taking stock of achievements and paving plans

Hamburg, December 1-3, 2025

The WarmWorld-Faster met this week in Offenbach for their annual meeting, kindly hosted by the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD).

The Faster module is one of the four pillars of WarmWorld — alongside Better, Easier, and Smarter — working toward an exascale-ready, kilometre-scale Earth-system modelling framework. But Faster is also the first module to start under the WarmWorld umbrella, which also means that it is the first one now to take stock of 3 years of deelopments and achievements.

Since its launch in September 2022, Faster has been systematically refactoring ICON, unpacking core components into maintainable modules, improving portability, and enabling language interoperability — all along being at the forefront of pushing the frontiers for high-resolution Earth system modelling. This effort has culminated last week with international recognition with the award of the Gordon Bell Prize for Climate to the ICON team.

Highlights of the meeting

This meeting serves as the forum to cover the topics below and offers a chance to align on priorities, exchange experiences, foster collaboration and identify opportunities for tighter integration across WarmWorld and other high-resolution climate modelling initiatives, with partners from EXCLAIM and OpenICON joining:

• Review 3 years of progress across work packages and activity groups
• Present updates on technical developments in ICON-C
• Discuss interoperability, modularisation, and code-porting strategies
• Coordinate with the other WarmWorld modules ahead of the next project phase
• Plan the roadmap for 2025–2026 and beyond

The meeting offers a chance to align on priorities, exchange experiences, and identify opportunities for tighter integration across the entire WarmWorld initiative.

Why This Matters

Faster’s work is essential for enabling the scientific goals of WarmWorld — especially global kilometre-scale simulations that can resolve storms, cloud systems, ocean eddies, and ice processes more realistically than ever. Thus, the module is transforming ICON from a monolithic climate model into a future-proof, community-friendly modelling framework, allowing to:

• Run high-fidelity simulations at unprecedented resolution
• Prepare for rapidly evolving HPC systems
• Collaborate more easily through flexible plugin interfaces
• Adapt and extend the model for specialised research questions
• Bridge climate science and real-world impacts with more credible modelling tools

The WarmWorld Faster Module Meeting 2025 marks an important milestone in building a next-generation climate modelling ecosystem. As the Faster module reviews progress and charts the path forward, the climate research community can look ahead to more efficient, flexible, and powerful modelling tools — ultimately supporting a deeper understanding of our warming world.