Sandia National Laboratories announced that a team, under their leadership, secured the Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling from the Association for Computing Machinery by running a high-resolution global atmospheric model on the world's inaugural exascale supercomputer. The award recognizes innovative computing contributions that address the global climate crisis. This significant achievement took place at an event in Denver.
The technological strides taken by Sandia National Laboratories are illustrated in their recent accomplishment. SCREAM, a comprehensive atmospheric general-circulation model designed for exascale machines, integrates cutting-edge parameterizations for fluid dynamics, microphysics, moist turbulence, and radiation to enable highly detailed simulations. Recognized at the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, SC23, in Denver on Nov. 16, the Gordon Bell Prize, awarded for the first time this year and accompanied by a $10,000 prize from pioneer Gordon Bell acknowledged the potential impact of the Sandia-led model on climate modeling and related fields according to a press release by Sandia National Laboratories.
Mark Taylor's remarks further elucidate on this groundbreaking work carried out by Sandia. "We have created the first global cloud-resolving model to simulate a world’s year of climate in a day," said Sandia researcher Mark Taylor, the chief computational scientist of Energy Exascale Earth Systems Model or E3SM according to a press release by Sandia National Laboratories. "We’re ushering in a new era of accuracy."
The involvement of multiple laboratories indicates how E3SM is not only pioneering but also collaborative effort. E3SM, an initiative led by Lawrence Livermore National Lab involving eight laboratories is backed by Department of Energy's Office of Science to advance development of sophisticated climate models. This model predicts the potential impact of Earth's climate system on U.S conditions in coming decades including extreme temperatures, droughts, floods, and rising sea levels was showcased by Taylor who led the Gordon Bell submission. The team demonstrated the record-setting capabilities of SCREAM, the Simple Cloud Resolving E3SM Atmosphere Model on Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Frontier supercomputer capable of performing 1.2 exaFLOPs (1.2 quintillion computing operations per second) according to a press release by Sandia National Laboratories.