The Gordon Bell Prize Winners Using Nvidia Supercomputers

High-performance computing has become central to addressing challenges in climate science, materials research and disaster preparedness – with supercomputers enabling simulations that were impractical using conventional systems. 

Now, two teams using Nvidia-powered supercomputers have won Gordon Bell Prizes for work on tsunami forecasting and climate modelling, demonstrating how computational power is reshaping scientific research.

The University of Texas at Austin, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the University of California San Diego won the Gordon Bell Prize for creating a digital twin that issues real-time probabilistic tsunami forecasts based on a full-physics model. 

A second team from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, German Climate Computing Centre, Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, ETH Zurich, the University of Hamburg and Nvidia won the Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling for their work on the ICON Earth system model.

The winners were announced at SC25, the international conference for high-performance computing. 

Five teams were shortlisted for the prizes, with projects spanning climate modelling, materials science, fluid simulation, geophysics and electronic design.

How Alps and JUPITER supercomputers enable breakthrough research

The research teams used three supercomputers for their work.

Alps, hosted at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, is powered by more than 10,000 Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips – which combine a central processing unit with a graphics processing unit on a single module. 

JUPITER, Europe’s first exascale supercomputer capable of performing a quintillion calculations per second, is hosted at Jülich Supercomputing Centre. 

Then Perlmutter, hosted at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center in California, runs on Nvidia accelerated computing hardware.

Thomas Schulthess, Director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre, says: “At CSCS, we don’t just support open science – we accelerate it.”

He adds that the work by this year’s five Gordon Bell finalists “stand as irrefutable proof: without the Alps supercomputer, these scientific discoveries simply would not exist”.

The tsunami digital twin developed by the University of Texas team accomplished computations that would normally take 50 years on 512 graphics processing units (GPUs)  in just 0.2 seconds on the Alps and Perlmutter supercomputers. 

Applied to the Cascadia subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest, the system combines real-time sensor data with full-physics modelling and uncertainty quantification.

Omar Ghattas, Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, says: “For the first time, real-time sensor data can be rapidly combined with full-physics modelling and uncertainty quantification to give people a chance to act before disaster strikes.”

He notes the framework “provides a basis for predictive, physics-based emergency-response systems across various hazards”.

How the ICON climate model achieves kilometre-scale Earth simulation

The ICON Earth system model developed by the Max Planck Institute team models the entire Earth’s systems at kilometre-scale resolution, capturing the flow of energy, water and carbon through the atmosphere, oceans and land. 

Running on JUPITER, the model achieved what researchers describe as a world record in global climate simulation, with the ability to simulate approximately 146 days every 24 hours. 

This temporal compression enables climate simulations projecting decades forward with efficiency that traditional models cannot match.

Daniel Klocke, Computational Infrastructure and Model Development Group Leader at Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, says integrating all components of the Earth system in ICON “at an unprecedented resolution of 1 kilometre allows researchers to see full global Earth system information on local scales and learn more about the implications of future warming for both people and ecosystems”.

Three other projects were shortlisted for the Gordon Bell Prize. 

Additionally, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Nvidia developed ORBIT-2, an AI foundation model for weather and climate downscaling that creates high-resolution data from lower-resolution sources – enabling teams to capture localised phenomena, including urban heat islands and extreme precipitation events.

Prasanna Balaprakash, Director of AI Programs and Section Head for Data and AI Systems at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, says Nvidia’s technologies “enabled ORBIT-2 to achieve exceptional scalability, reliability and impact at the intersection of AI and high-performance computing on Nvidia platforms”.

ETH Zurich developed QuaTrEx, a package of algorithms for nanoscale electronic device modelling. 

Running on Alps with Nvidia GH200 Superchips, the system can simulate devices with more than 45,000 atoms using 64-bit floating-point precision.

Mathieu Luisier, full Professor of Computational Nanoelectronics at ETH Zurich, says: “Access to Alps was instrumental in the development of QuaTrEx. It allowed us to simulate devices that we could not imagine handling just a few months ago.”

The Georgia Institute of Technology, working with Nvidia, also developed MFC, an open-source solver for fluid flow simulation used in spacecraft design. 

Running on Alps, the system enables simulation four times faster and with over five times greater energy efficiency than the previous benchmark.

Spencer Bryngelson, Assistant Professor in Computational Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says the team’s “new information geometric regularisation method, combined with the Nvidia GH200 Superchip’s unified virtual memory and mixed-precision capabilities, has drastically improved the efficiency of simulating complex computational fluid flows, enabling us to simulate rocket engine plumes at unprecedented scales”.

Thomas adds: “Pushing computational boundaries turns bold targets into reality, delivering scientific revolutions that will redefine our world.”