NSF NCAR researcher part of team that wins the 2024 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, has awarded the 2024 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling to a 12-member team for their project “Boosting Earth System Model Outputs and Saving PetaBytes in Their Storage Using Exascale Climate Emulators.” The award recognizes innovative parallel computing contributions toward solving the global climate crisis. 

Dr. Allison H. Baker of the Computational and Information Systems Lab (CISL) at the National Science Foundation (NSF) National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is a member of the prize-winning team. 

At last week’s SC24 conference, the team, led by researchers from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), presented the design and implementation of an exascale climate emulator for addressing the escalating computational and storage requirements of high-resolution Earth System Model simulations. 

In computing, emulators allow for a dynamic interplay between different computers—with one computer system (called the host) behaving like another computer system (the guest). The growing use of emulators in climate modeling has become more common as emulators can combine and enhance efficient algorithms to handle large datasets, as well as the distribution of computations across multiple processors.

For more information on the project, the team, and the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling, see this ACM press release.