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A team led by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the German Climate Computing Center has received the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling for their groundbreaking work at the intersection of climate science and high-performance computing. Their achievement — a landmark simulation of the full Earth system with the ICON model at 1.25-kilometer resolution — overcame a challenge long considered impossible. The prize was awarded at the Supercomputing Conference (SC25) in St. Louis, Missouri, US.
Using the ICON Earth system model, a research team led by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M) and the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) successfully simulated the Earth system, including atmosphere, ocean, land, and the full carbon cycle, at a horizontal grid spacing of 1.25 km with a throughput sufficient to simulate a decade per month. For this, the ICON team received the Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling, awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and worth US $10,000 at SC25—the world’s leading conference on high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis—in St. Louis, Missouri, US.
Representatives of the research team—including experts from the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, ETH Zurich, the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, the University of Hamburg, and NVIDIA—accepted the award at the conference.
“This award testifies to the powerful synergy between science and technology and to exceptional teamwork. I am delighted and grateful for this wonderful recognition from ACM as well as from all our colleagues,” said MPI-M researcher Daniel Klocke, who led the project.
A LANDMARK SIMULATION
Achieving a resolution of 1.25 kilometers requires evaluating the mathematical equations governing the Earth system for tens of billions of grid cells at every time step—a computationally immense task. ICON, developed over more than 20 years through the ICON partnership, has been adapted to use the hardware of the most advanced supercomputers with exceptional efficiency. In this project, the team harnessed the full power of NVIDIA GH200 Superchips on two of Europe’s largest supercomputers: Alps in Switzerland and JUPITER in Germany. An unprecedented time compression of 145.7 simulated days per day was achieved while using 85% of JUPITER’s computing resources.
ICON employed novel methods for data-centric optimization and leveraged both the CPUs and GPUs of each node to balance Earth system components in a heterogeneous setup. This approach also enabled a particularly energy-efficient simulation:
“Energy consumption in high-performance computing is becoming increasingly important, and here our approach delivers. We show that we can save more than a factor of four in energy compared to a classical, purely CPU-based setup,” said Jan Frederik Engels, scientist at DKRZ.
The simulation allows researchers to resolve links between the carbon, energy, and water cycles and to study how their interactions shape the Earth system. It stands as both a scientific and technological milestone, demonstrating that ICON uses current high-performance computing systems so efficiently that producing such simulations for different future scenarios is now conceivable. Prior to the award ceremony, the team had already received the HPCwire Readers' Choice Award for the “Top HPC-Enabled Scientific Achievement.”
DESTINATION EARTH AMONG THE FINALISTS
In addition to the ICON Earth system simulation, another project in which MPI-M and DKRZ are involved had ranged among the finalists for the Gordon Bell Prize for climate modeling: the Destination Earth digital twin for climate change adaptation led by CSC – IT Center for Science. Next to ICON, the European project Destination Earth also uses the atmospheric model IFS coupled to two ocean models—NEMO and FESOM. The initiative is led by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) and also includes partners from CSC – IT Center for Science, the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
The recognition of these two climate-science-driven projects underscores the strong synergy between climate research and high-performance computing—a relationship that continuously pushes both fields toward new horizons.
ABOUT THE AWARDS
The American Association for Computing Machinery awards the Gordon Bell Prize annually for outstanding achievements in HPC. Since 2023, the additional award category “Climate Modelling” has recognized innovations that advance the understanding of the climate system and climate change.
HPCwire, on the other hand, is a news site and weekly newsletter covering the fastest computers in the world and the people who run them. The coveted HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards are revealed each year to kick off the annual supercomputing conference.
Dr. Daniel Klocke
Max Planck Institute for Meteorology
daniel.klocke@mpimet.mpg.de
Dr. Jan Frederik Engels
German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ)
engels@dkrz.de
Dr. Claudia Frauen
German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ)
frauen@dkrz.de
Dr. Cathy Hohenegger
Max Planck Institute for Meteorology
cathy.hohenegger@mpimet.mpg.de
ICON ESM: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3712285.3771789
DestinE: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3712285.3771790
https://awards.acm.org/bell-climate - Announcement of the winners of the Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling
https://www.hpcwire.com/off-the-wire/hpcwire-reveals-winners-of-the-22nd-annual-... - List of winners of the HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Award
Using CO₂ exchange in the Amazon basin, the visualization demonstrates the high resolution of the IC ...
Copyright: DKRZ/MPI-M/NVIDIA
Representatives of the research team consisting of MPI-M, DKRZ, JSC, ETH Zurich, the Swiss National ...
Copyright: DKRZ
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