Pakistani academic among researchers to win Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling

A multi-institutional team of researchers, including a Pakistani academic, has won the Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling by creating an advanced predictive model for climate analysis, a statement from the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) said.

LUMS Associate Professor Dr. Zubair Khalid was part of the 12-member team that won the award, which recognizes innovative parallel computing contributions toward solving the global climate crisis. 

The team presented the project, titled, “Boosting Earth System Model Outputs and Saving PetaBytes in Their Storage Using Exascale Climate Emulators,” at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) conference that was held in Atlanta earlier this November.

“The university has been instrumental in supporting my contributions to this endeavour by fostering an environment that encourages interdisciplinary research and collaboration,” LUMS said in a statement, quoting Dr. Khalid. 

“Through my Center for Urban Informatics, Technology, and Policy, the university facilitated my engagement with global research networks and positioned me to contribute to high-impact international projects.”

Dean of the Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering at LUMS, Dr. Walther Schwarzacher, congratulated Dr. Khalid for winning the prestigious award.

“This remarkable achievement highlights the outstanding contributions that the School’s faculty are making to address some of the greatest scientific challenges facing our society,” the statement quoted Schwarzacher as saying.

The Gordon Bell Prize is presented by the Association for Computing Machinery each year in conjunction with the SC Conference series, formerly known as the Supercomputing Conference. The prize was established in 1987. A cash award of $10,000 (since 2011) accompanies the recognition, funded by Gordon Bell, a pioneer in high-performance and parallel computing.