An eight-member research team from Australian and American institutions has been awarded the 2024 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for their project, “Breaking the Million-Electron and 1 E FLOP/s Barriers: Biomolecular-Scale Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics Using MP2 Potentials.”
Using their algorithmic innovations on a powerful exascale computer, the team achieved a record-breaking performance of simulating more than one million electrons for a computational chemistry application, and scaling their algorithm to an exaflop per second, resulting in a simulation 1,000 times larger in system-size than the existing state-of-the-art and 1,000 times faster than any previous model.
The ACM Gordon Bell Prize is awarded each year to recognise outstanding achievement in high-performance computing. The purpose of this recognition is to track the progress of parallel computing and rewards innovation in applying high-performance computing to challenges in science, engineering, and large-scale data analytics.
ACM also presented a 12-member team from Saudi Arabia and the United States with the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling for their project, “Boosting Earth System Model Outputs and Saving PetaBytes in Their Storage Using Exascale Climate Emulators.” The prize-winning team presented the design and implementation of an exascale climate emulator for addressing the escalating computational and storage requirements of high-resolution Earth System Model simulations.
ACM established the ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling in 2023 to recognize the contributions of climate scientists and software engineers applying high-performance computing to climate modelling applications. Recipients are selected based on the performance and innovation in their computational methods and their contributions toward improving climate modelling and our understanding of the Earth’s climate system.
Both awards were presented during the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC24) in Atlanta, Georgia.
