Gordon Bell Climate Prize Goes to KAUST Frontier Users’ Exascale Climate Emulator

The 2024 Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling has been awarded to a team of researchers led by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or KAUST, Saudi Arabia, who used the Frontier supercomputer to develop an exascale climate emulator with radically enhanced resolution but without the computational expense and data storage requirements of state-of-the-art climate models.

Team members also include researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Notre Dame, NVIDIA, Saint Louis University and Lahore University of Management Sciences.

The winners of the climate prize, awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery, were announced on Nov. 21 at the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis in Atlanta, Georgia.

“This is a tremendous honor and we are extremely proud of our achievement,” said Marc Genton, Al-Khawarizmi distinguished professor of statistics at KAUST. “We believe this emulator will significantly enhance our ability to understand climate events much better at the local level as well as on the global scale.”

Recipients of the 2024 Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling include (left to right) Georgiy Stenchikov (KAUST), Stefano Castruccio (University of Notre Dame), David Keyes, Marc Genton, Sameh Abdulah, Hatem Ltaief (KAUST), George Bosilca (NVIDIA), Zubair Khalid (LUMS), Yan Song (KAUST), and Qinglei Cao (SLU). Credit: SC24

“Climate models are incredibly complex and can take weeks or months to run, even on the fastest supercomputers,” he added. They generate massive amounts of data that become nearly impossible to store, and it’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem as climate scientists are constantly pushing for higher resolution.”

Earth system models, or ESMs, are supercomputer programs used to calculate changes in the atmosphere, oceans, land and ice sheets. The simulations are based on the quantifiable laws of physics and are some of the most computationally demanding calculations to perform in terms of complexity, power consumption and processing time. Nevertheless, ESMs are essential tools for predicting the impacts of climate change.

“The climate emulator solves two problems: speeding up computations and reducing storage needs,” Genton said. “It’s designed to mimic model outputs on demand without storing petabytes of data. Instead of saving every result, all we have to store are the emulator code and necessary parameters, which, in principle, allows us to generate an infinite number of emulations whenever we need them.”

A research team led by the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology used the Frontier and Summit supercomputers to help them develop a climate emulator that offers radically enhanced resolution without the need to store massive amounts of data. Credit: KAUST

Less is more

By leveraging the latest advances in graphics processing units, or GPUs, hardware and mixed-precision arithmetic, the team’s climate emulator offers a remarkable resolution of 3.5 kilometers (approximately 2.2 miles) and can replicate local conditions on a timescale from days to hours.

“Using mixed precision to improve performance is something rather innovative in the field that also helps us preserve the emulator’s accuracy,” said Sameh Abdulah, a high-performance computing research scientist at KAUST.

“Not every element in the simulation needs to be calculated in double precision,” Abdulah added. “Mixing the precision allows us to prioritize the accuracy based on the most important elements, which in turn speeds up the overall calculations.”

The emulator is highly scalable and has demonstrated exceptional performance on four of the world’s top 10 most powerful supercomputers, including the Frontier and Summit supercomputers at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility. The OLCF is a Department of Energy Office of Science user facility and is located at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The emulator also performed well on the Alps supercomputer, ranked no. 6, at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano, Switzerland, and on the Leonardo supercomputer, ranked no. 7, at the CINECA data center in Bologna, Italy. The team also made extensive use of KAUST’s Shaheen III, ranked no. 23, the largest and most powerful supercomputer in the Middle East.

“Sustainable computing is another advantage. Getting the answer faster means less storage, which also means saving energy,” Genton said. “Supercomputing requires a lot of energy. By mixing the precision, we reduce the time we need to run, making it more sustainable for climate studies by getting more out of the machine.”

According to Abdulah at the time of the achievement, the next step the team wanted to take was straightforward: “winning the prize,” he said. “And now we’ve finally done it.”

Read the full story, Frontier Users’ Exascale Climate Emulator Nominated for Gordon Bell Climate Prize

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.