KAUST awarded Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling
KAUST becomes first Middle East institution to win Gordon Bell Prize
#Saudi #awards - Saudi Arabia's research university King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and its partners have been awarded the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling, marking the first time an institution from the Middle East has received a Gordon Bell Prize. The university’s entry was developed in partnership with NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research and other partner institutions. The award recognises KAUST’s pioneering work in creating efficient, high-resolution Earth System Models, crucial for advancing global climate solutions.
SO WHAT? - KAUST has consistently submitted highly placed entries for the Gordon Bell Prize. In 2022, a team from KAUST and ICL was among five finalists for the 2022 Gordon Bell Prize for building ExaGeoStat, a climate–weather prediction model, developed on the Fugaku supercomputer at RIKEN (Japan’s National Research and Development Agency). A KAUST team was shortlisted again as a finalist for the 2023 Gordon Bell Prize prize in partnership with Cerebras Systems, with a project developed using the Condor Galaxy supercomputer, built by Cerebras and G42. So, this year’s award is also the cumulative result of years of research and hard work.
The key details regarding the Gordon Bell Prize:
The ACM Gordon Bell Prize is regarded as the ‘Nobel’ of high-performance computing and honours outstanding innovations in the field. The ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling recognises innovative parallel computing contributions toward solving the global climate crisis.
This week the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) presented a 12-member King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) team with the award for its project Boosting Earth System Model Outputs and Saving PetaBytes in Their Storage Using Exascale Climate Emulators.
KAUST's winning paper tackled the immense computational and storage demands of high-resolution climate models.
The research was a collaboration with the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research (USA), University of Notre Dame, Saint Louis University, and NVIDIA.
The team demonstrated their climate emulator on supercomputers such as KAUST’s Shaheen III, achieving savings of several petabytes in storage (one petabyte is equivalent to the storage capacity of approximately the equivalent of 170 top-tier servers).
The emulator employs statistical techniques to reduce the need for massive, detailed simulations while delivering high-resolution climate insights.
The members of the winning team are: Sameh Abdulah, Marc G. Genton, David E. Keyes, Zubair Khalid, Hatem Ltaief, Yan Song, Greorgiy L. Stenchikov and Ying Sun (all KAUST); Allison H. Baker (NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA); George Bosilca, (NVIDIA, USA); Qinglei Cao (St. Louis University, USA); and Stefano Castruccio (University of Notre Dame, USA).
This achievement also positions KAUST as a key player in climate innovation, with the university set to present its applied climate solutions at COP16 in Riyadh this December.
KAUST was a double finalist at this year’s ACM Gordon Bell Prize. The university’s teams qualified as finalists for the Gordon Bell Prize and the Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling for two separate research projects exemplifying the power of interdisciplinary collaboration and global partners.
The award was presented during the SC24 International Conference for High Performance Computing in Atlanta, Georgia.
THE AWARD - The Gordon Bell Prize is presented by the Association for Computing Machinery each year in conjunction with the SC Conference (formerly known as the Supercomputing Conference). The prize is primarily focused on awarding peak performance in supercomputing. The Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling was launched in 2023 and will be awarded every year for ten years, recognising the contributions of climate scientists and software engineers.
LINKS
Learn more about KAUST:
Podcast: KAUST’s new Centre of Excellence in GenAI (Middle East AI News)
The Middle East’s most powerful supercomputer (Middle East AI News)
KAUST's trials autonomous delivery (Middle East AI News)