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A 12-member international team that included Pakistani researcher Zubair Khalid won the 2024 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling. The project used an exascale climate emulator to help produce Earth system model outputs while reducing the computing time and storage they require. Media have described the honor as a supercomputing “Nobel,” but its formal name is the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling.
What award did Zubair Khalid’s team win?
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) awarded the team the 2024 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling. ACM says the prize recognizes innovative parallel-computing contributions aimed at addressing the global climate crisis. Its award materials list a $10,000 cash prize accompanying the honor.
“Supercomputing Nobel” is an informal analogy used in media coverage, including Dawn’s December 10, 2024 report; it is not the prize’s official name and does not make the award equivalent to a Nobel Prize.
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Who was on the winning team?
Khalid, an associate professor at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), was one of 12 recipients. LUMS described him as the first Pakistani to receive the prize. ACM’s award booklet lists Khalid with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) for the project; that project affiliation is distinct from his LUMS faculty role.
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The other recipients were Sameh Abdullah, Marc G. Genton, David E. Keyes, Hatem Ltaief, Yan Song, Georgiy L. Stenchikov, Ying Sun, Allison H. Baker, George Bosilca, Qinglei Cao and Stefano Castruccio. ACM lists the first eight recipients, including Khalid, with KAUST; Baker with the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research; Bosilca with NVIDIA; Cao with Saint Louis University; and Castruccio with the University of Notre Dame. The ACM roster provides the award’s recipient and affiliation details.
What did the climate-emulation project do?
The winning project, “Boosting Earth System Model Outputs and Saving PetaBytes in Their Storage Using Exascale Climate Emulators,” developed an emulator to improve Earth system model outputs while reducing the computational time and storage burden associated with high-resolution climate modelling. An emulator uses computational methods to approximate or extend model outputs, potentially making some analyses less demanding than generating every output through costly simulations. ACM describes the project’s aim as enabling more accurate and detailed climate-change predictions; that is a statement of purpose, not evidence that the team demonstrated improved real-world prediction accuracy.
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The performance figures reported by LUMS
LUMS reported the team’s claim that its proposed work surpassed existing climate emulators by a factor of 245,280, with 3.25-kilometre spatial and hourly temporal resolution. The university also said the code ran on four major GPU systems: Frontier, Alps, Leonardo and Summit. These are claims reported by LUMS and attributed to the team; they should not be read as an independently verified improvement in climate-prediction accuracy.
Why could this work matter?
High-resolution Earth system modelling can demand substantial computing resources and generate large volumes of output to store and analyze. A technique that reduces those costs could help researchers work with detailed model outputs more efficiently. That potential is especially relevant to climate research, where scientists need to understand patterns across time and space. The prize recognizes the team’s contribution in parallel computing and climate modelling; it does not, by itself, establish that the emulator replaces Earth system models or that its outputs have already changed forecasts.
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What Khalid said about the award
LUMS quoted Khalid as saying: “It is an incredibly humbling honour to be the first Pakistani to receive this prestigious award.” The university identified him as an associate professor at LUMS in its November 2024 announcement.
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