Manoel Rommer

ACM presented a 26-member team with the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling in recognition of their project “Computing the Full Earth System at 1 km Resolution.” The award honors innovative contributions to parallel computing toward solving the global climate crisis.

Climate change is responsible for more extreme hurricanes, more destructive wildfires, severe droughts, and increased human disease, among other harmful outcomes. Experts warn that if carbon emissions are not significantly reduced within a few decades, the damage to the Earth’s ecosystem will be irreversible.

Among the most effective tools scientists have developed to understand climate change are digital simulations of the Earth. These simulations are produced by developing specific algorithms to run on the world’s most powerful supercomputers. But simulating how human activity influences the climate has been an extraordinarily difficult challenge. A mind-boggling number of variables need to be taken into consideration—such as the cycles of water, energy, and carbon, how those factors relate to each other, and how diverse physical, biological, and chemical processes interact over space and time. For these reasons, previous state-of-the-art simulations have not been able to achieve what is referred to as a “Full Earth System” simulation.

The Gordon Bell Climate Prize-winning team reached a landmark this year by being the first team ever to develop a Full Earth Simulation at 1 km (extremely high) Resolution. In their introduction, they explain, “We present the first-ever global simulation of the full Earth system at 1.25 km grid spacing, achieving highest time compression with an unseen number of degrees of freedom. Our model captures the flow of energy, water, and carbon through key components of the Earth system: atmosphere, ocean, and land. To achieve this landmark simulation, the team harnessed the power of 8192 GPUs on Alps and 4096 GPUs on JUPITER, two of the world’s largest GH200 superchip installations.”

The groundbreaking innovations the team employed to make the Full Earth Simulation possible include (1) exploiting functional parallelism by efficiently mapping components to specialized heterogeneous systems and (2) simplifying the implementation and optimization of an important component by separating its implementation in Fortran from the optimization details of the target architecture.

In the conclusion to their paper they write, “This has enormous and enduring potential to provide full global Earth system information on local scales about the implications of future warming for both people and eco-systems, information that otherwise would not exist.”

Team Members 

The members of the team are: Daniel Klocke, René Redler, Reiner Schnur, Helmuth Haak, Luis Kornblueh, Cathy Hohenegger, Nils Brüggemann, and Bjorn Stevens (all of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology); Claudia Frauen, Jan Frederik Engels, and Hendryk Bockelmann (all of Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum); Dmitry Alexeev (NVIDIA),; Fatemeh Chegini (University of Hamburg), Manoel Römmer, Lars Hoffmann, Sabine Griessbach, Mathis Bode, and Andreas Herten (all of Forschungszentrum Jülich), Jonathan Coles, Miguel Gila, and William Sawyer (all of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre); as well as Alexandru Calotoiu, Torsten Hoefler, Yakup Budanaz, Pratyai Mazumder, Marcin Copik, and Benjamin Weber (all of ETH Zurich).

The ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling was presented at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC25), held in St. Louis, Missouri.