On November 21, 2024, the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling was awarded to a 12-member team for their groundbreaking project aimed at enhancing Earth System Model outputs while significantly reducing data storage needs.

The project, titled 'Boosting Earth System Model Outputs And Saving PetaBytes in Their Storage Using Exascale Climate Emulators,' focuses on innovative parallel computing techniques to address the pressing challenges of climate change.

Recent advancements in exascale supercomputers have enabled sophisticated climate modeling, allowing researchers to process quintillions of calculations per second for a better understanding of climate dynamics.

The team's use of emulators facilitates efficient data processing and computation across multiple systems, optimizing the handling of large datasets crucial for climate modeling.

Their emulator is projected to save several petabytes of data storage, equivalent to the capacity of about 170 top-end servers, thereby enhancing computational efficiency.

The ultra-high resolution climate model developed by the team includes over 54 million spatial locations and billions of observations, significantly improving the fidelity of climate simulations.

Mixed-precision computations were executed on high-performance computing systems, including Frontier and Summit, achieving notable performance rates that underscore the project's success.

The implications of this work extend beyond research, influencing climate policy and supporting the development of machine learning and AI applications in climate science.

This award recognizes significant contributions in parallel computing that address the global climate crisis, which is exacerbated by human-induced global warming.

The prize, which includes a $10,000 cash award, is part of a ten-year initiative to promote innovation in computational methods related to climate science.

The diverse team comprises researchers from institutions such as King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, NVIDIA, St. Louis University, and University of Notre Dame.

The ACM Gordon Bell Prize was presented during the SC24 conference held in Atlanta, Georgia, from November 17 to 22, 2024, highlighting the importance of computational advancements in tackling climate issues.