NEWS

A team led by the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the German Climate Computing Centre was awarded the 2025 Gordon Bell Prize in climate modelling. The awards, given during this year’s annual SC conference series, are considered among the most prestigious in the field of high-performance computing (HPC). The team enhanced the ICON climate model to incorporate more detailed modelling of atmosphere, oceans, land surfaces and sea ice, operating the simulation at a horizontal resolution of roughly 1.25 kilometers. Previous simulations with the model have typically operated at a resolution of 5 to 10 kilometers, representing a major step forward in the simulation’s resolution, leading to more accuracy and greater predictive power.

The team worked closely with collaborators from the University of Hamburg, the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), ETH Zurich, and NVIDIA, and used both the JUPITER supercomputer at JSC—one of the flagship supercomputers funded via the Gauss Centre for Supercomputing—and the Alps supercomputer at CSCS. Both systems rank among the world’s fastest according to the latest Top500 list. 

To learn more about the team’s research, please read the original JSC news release.