From Scientific Exchange to Hands-on Collaboration
Within the Life Sciences pillar, three young researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology, CINECA and Utrecht University took part in the GANANA Mobility Program in February 2026, travelling to Pune, India, ahead of the project’s second High-Level Symposium. Hosted by C-DAC, GANANA’s main Indian partner under the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), the exchange brought the European and Indian teams together for a period of intensive scientific discussion, hands-on work and knowledge sharing.
During their stay, the researchers worked closely with their C-DAC counterparts on one of the projects within the Life Sciences pillar, the “Framework for AI-driven Immunogenic Peptide Prediction”. The activity focuses on developing a computational workflow to generate the data needed to support AI-based prediction of how the immune system may respond to specific peptides. The workflow will be used primarily on CINECA’s Leonardo supercomputer, while also being developed and tested on Indian HPC infrastructures, creating a direct link between European and Indian computing resources.
The opportunity to work side by side was particularly valuable for refining the workflow, which brings together several computational methods developed by different partners. After a year of work on individual components, the face-to-face discussions provided the teams with the opportunity to reassess the overall design, clarify open questions and agree on the next steps. As Cathrine Bergh from KTH explains:
“Through daily group discussions, the workflow design was rapidly refined and question marks were sorted out.”
Working together in person also provided an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the technologies and infrastructures being developed at C-DAC. Particular attention was given to ICE-Cloud, C-DAC’s cloud-based computing infrastructure, which provides users with access to computing resources and services in a flexible cloud environment. The platform became one of the highlights of the exchange, as the researchers worked on the deployment of HADDOCK3 and its web application on ICE-Cloud. HADDOCK3 is a computational platform used to study how biological molecules interact by modelling their structures and interactions. Its successful deployment on ICE-Cloud was officially showcased during the High-Level Symposium, marking an important milestone for the teams involved.
The mobility also had a strong educational component. The researchers worked together to prepare the India–EU GANANA Workshop on Integrative Modelling of Biomolecules, held at C-DAC on 23–24 February. The workshop introduced participants to GROMACS, a software package used to simulate the behaviour of molecules, and HADDOCK3, providing hands-on activities that allowed around 40 Indian students to work directly with the tools. The collaboration resulted in new educational materials, including practical exercises connected to the Life Sciences activities, which can also be further adapted for future GANANA activities.
Overall, the mobility gave the Life Sciences teams valuable time to work together on ongoing tasks, refine the computational workflow, exchange expertise on HPC infrastructures and prepare new training activities. By bringing together researchers who normally collaborate remotely, the exchange helped turn ongoing scientific cooperation into more direct and practical collaboration.
Bringing Expertise and Local Knowledge Together
In the Weather & Climate pillar, researchers from CMCC, Bull (formerly Eviden) and BSC took part in the Mobility Program. The exchange brought together European expertise in weather and climate modelling, HPC performance and infrastructure with the scientific and technical knowledge of the Indian teams at C-DAC, creating an opportunity for a genuinely two-way exchange of knowledge.
The first part of the exchange focused on getting to know PARAM Rudra, C-DAC’s Indian supercomputer, and comparing its architecture and working environment with major European HPC systems, including MareNostrum5. These discussions provided a common starting point for understanding the infrastructures and the different approaches used to run and support weather and climate applications on large-scale computing systems.
From this initial exchange, the teams moved to the main scientific and technical activities of the pillar, working with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model and regional climate modelling with ICON-CLM. One of the key objectives was to successfully deploy and use ICON-CLM on PARAM Rudra to support high-resolution regional climate simulations over India.
Bringing the model into the Indian context also raised a number of practical and scientific challenges that could be addressed more effectively by the teams working together. One of the first was the definition of the geographical domain for the simulations. The initial domain extended towards the Himalayas, an area characterised by particularly complex climatic conditions, leading the teams to reconsider the geographical area covered by the model and identify a broader and more suitable domain. Other challenges concerned the transfer of large volumes of data from CMCC infrastructure to PARAM Rudra, as well as the representation of precipitation patterns around Pune.
The exchange allowed the teams to work together on these challenges and find solutions jointly. This highlighted three essential aspects of the collaboration. First, spending time in close contact and working together on concrete challenges led to hands-on collaboration and helped address infrastructure and technical issues that would have been much more difficult and time-consuming to resolve remotely without the Mobility Programme. Second, the importance of EU–India collaboration goes beyond models and HPC infrastructure: it also involves the management, transfer and sharing of large volumes of data. Most importantly, the exchange showed that the know-how was truly bidirectional: the European partners brought their expertise in weather and climate models, while the Indian partners contributed their specific knowledge of local climatic characteristics and challenges.
This two-way exchange was also reflected in the work of BSC and Bull, which focused on making better use of PARAM Rudra’s computing capabilities for weather and climate applications. BSC worked particularly on WRF, exploring how the model could be analysed and its performance improved on HPC systems, while Bull contributed its HPC expertise to the analysis and optimisation of application performance.
BSC and Bull/Eviden brought their HPC expertise to the exchange, sharing their technical knowledge and experience to support the improvement of the performance of weather and climate applications.
The discussions highlighted the importance of working with representative use cases, ensuring that performance improvements can translate into real benefits for future scientific applications. Together with C-DAC’s knowledge of the local infrastructure, this work helped the teams identify concrete directions for improving the use of HPC resources for weather and climate applications.
As the BSC team highlighted, “The exchange provided a valuable opportunity to strengthen technical collaboration, and methodologies and define concrete next steps for joint work in weather, climate and HPC.”
More broadly, it showed how bringing together complementary expertise can turn a technical exchange into a shared process of problem-solving, with knowledge flowing in both directions between Europe and India.
The exchange was not only about making a climate model run on an Indian supercomputer. It was also about understanding how European and Indian researchers can work together, combine technical expertise with local knowledge, solve practical challenges, and build the foundations for future joint research.
European and Indian researchers worked side by side on real scientific applications, combining climate modelling expertise, HPC knowledge and local experience to address practical challenges and prepare the ground for future joint activities.
Connecting Across Research Areas: The Value of the Symposium
The exchange in Pune also highlighted the value of bringing researchers from different scientific areas together. While the mobility activities focused on specific research challenges, the second GANANA High-Level Symposium, held in Pune on 22–23 February, provided an opportunity to discover the work being carried out across the project and identify connections between activities that had developed in parallel.
As Leonardo Salicari from CINECA highlighted, one of the values of the Symposium was the opportunity to learn more about the work carried out across the different areas of GANANA and to discover that similar approaches and tools were already being used in different pillars. For example, automated workflows being explored for use on C-DAC HPC systems were also being used by other pillars working on different scientific challenges, such as GeoHazard.
These exchanges created opportunities to connect activities across different GANANA pillars, highlighting how shared HPC tools and expertise can support collaboration beyond individual research areas.
Beyond the Science: Building Relationships
C-DAC did not limit its role to hosting the European researchers and organising the technical aspects of the workshops and knowledge exchange. The team also organised social and cultural activities to give the European researchers the opportunity to discover Pune and experience aspects of local culture.
This reflects an important aspect of the Mobility Programme: mobility goes beyond the technical work. Working together in person, getting to know each other and creating personal relationships can make it easier to build stronger and more lasting collaborations. The value of these direct interactions was also highlighted by Victor Reys from Utrecht University, who took part in the exchange:
“Being able to have scientific discussion directly on site with the appropriate people involved in the project really improved my understanding and allowed for much deeper and greater dialogues than the ones allowed by the frequent video calls we are having.”
The importance of meeting in person also extends to future collaboration. As Antoine Morvan from Bull reflected:
“Identifying the people you need to work with, putting a face on them and meeting them live is critical to ease remote exchanges in the future.”
The experience in Pune showed that creating opportunities to meet, work together and share experiences in person can strengthen not only the scientific collaboration, but also the relationships that support it.
The February exchange showed the value of bringing European and Indian researchers together to work side by side. By turning online discussions into stronger relationships, greater mutual understanding and more concrete scientific activities, the Mobility Programme helped create solid foundations for future collaboration between Europe and India.
The experience in Pune showed that mobility is not simply about bringing researchers together in the same place. It is about creating the conditions for ideas to move, expertise to be shared and collaborations to grow.
