Winning team members accept the 2025 ACM Gordon Bell Prize at SC25. - Credit: Lillie Elliot, SC Photography
The paper “Real-time Bayesian inference at extreme scale: A digital twin for tsunami early warning applied to the Cascadia subduction zone,” has been awarded the 2025 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Gordon Bell Prize, one of the highest honors in high performance computing (HPC).
The Gordon Bell Prize recognizes outstanding achievement in HPC; the winners are announced each year at the Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis, better known as SC. NERSC supported two Gordon Bell Prize finalists this year.
The winning research team, from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the University of Texas at Austin, and associated institutions, presented a digital twin that enables real-time, data-driven tsunami forecasting. The model dynamically adapts to real-world seafloor behavior detected by sensors on the ocean floor, providing improved tsunami forecasting and advanced warning. The model solved a Bayesian inverse problem with one billion parameters in 0.2 seconds, a ten-billion-fold speedup over previous methods.
NERSC supported this research with a reservation that used all of Perlmutter’s GPUs over several hours. Dedicated staff support before and during the reservation, including communication with the science team and proactive system monitoring, ensured a smooth run.
About NERSC and Berkeley Lab
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) is the mission computing facility for the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the nation’s single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences.
Located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), NERSC serves 11,000 scientists at national laboratories and universities researching a wide range of problems in climate, fusion energy, materials sciences, physics, chemistry, computational biology, and other disciplines. An average of 2,000 peer-reviewed science results a year rely on NERSC resources and expertise, which has also supported the work of seven Nobel Prize-winning scientists and teams.
NERSC is a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility.
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