ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling

KAUST wins the “Nobel” of high-performance computing for climate modeling

1 min read · Fri, Nov 22 2024

HPC climate projections extreme computing computational simulations uncertainty quantification

KAUST has been awarded the “Nobel" prize of high-performance computing—the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling—in partnership with the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, U.S. and other partner institutions.

KAUST was a double finalist this year with two projects and won the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling for the paper: “Boosting earth system model outputs and saving petabytes in their storage using exascale climate emulators.” This was a collaborative effort from KAUST lead research scientist Sameh Abdulah, lead Principal Investigator Al-Khawarizmi Distinguished Professor Marc G. Genton, Professor David E. Keyes, principal research scientist Hatem Ltaief, Professor Georgiy L. Stenchikov, Associate Professor Ying Sun, and postdoc Yan Song. The partner institutions were the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Notre Dame, Saint Louis University, NVIDIA and Lahore University of Management Sciences.

The Gordon Bell Prize is a prestigious award named after the pioneering computer architect who founded the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Directorate for Computing and Information Sciences. The prize, in its 37th year, is awarded annually to recognize outstanding achievements in the field of high-performance computing (HPC) applied to real-world systems.

This is the first time an institution in the Middle East has won an ACM Gordon Bell Prize, a significant milestone for Saudi Arabia and the region.