With the birth of geosciences and then of computational geosciences, people’s attitude towards the world has changed. People are no longer passive observers but rather more proactive players in their environment and the knowledge gained from computational geosciences has been used to save lives and prepare for future scenarios. Now, with the Exascale computing era dawning upon us, even more accurate, clearer and faster data will be within our reach. However, computational methods and codes need to be reshaped and honed, and geoscientists need to be prepared for the upcoming challenges. 

The geoscience community is multidisciplinary and transversal, encompassing Earth observatories (e.g. monitoring networks, data providers, tsunami warning centres, etc), research and academia, model developers and, finally, model end-users and social agents. 

From a scientific point of view, the entire community is facing scientific breakthrough problems for which researchers need to share their knowledge and experience and make roadmap recommendations in order to contribute to the advancement of this rapidly growing field. The “Solid Earth and Geohazards in the Exascale Era” conference would bring together some of the world’s best minds in various branches of computational geosciences to jointly tackle challenges and issues of Exascale computing.

Europe is making a huge effort in the strategic global race to Exascale, with large investments in the infrastructure and the application pillars (e.g. Centers of Excellence and national Competence Centers). 

In 2023 the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking will have deployed 3 Pre-exascale machines (LUMI, Leonardo and MareNostrum-V), and 2 Exascale systems will follow afterwards. From the point of view of science and services, this unprecedented pan-European infrastructure opens a myriad of possibilities but, at the same time, the transition is challenging and requires a joint effort from (geo)scientists, software developers, and data analysts.