A prestigious Gordon Bell Prize has been awarded to a group of researchers, including Pakistani academic Dr. Zubair Khalid from Lahore University’s Management Sciences School, for their outstanding work in climate predictions through high-performance computing techniques. Commonly referred to as the “Nobel Prize for Supercomputing,” the awards are awarded for high-performance and parallel computing achievements that tackle resource crises, particularly in the area of climate change.
Also read: World Bank Questions Slow Progress of Pakistan’s EDEIP Project.
Dr. Khalid became the first Pakistani recipient of this prestigious award. The main focus includes the project “Boosting Earth System Model Outputs and Saving PetaBytes in Their Storage Using Exascale Climate Emulators,” which aims to improve radically the efficiency of climate modeling. The institute conceived an entirely new technique, which it termed as smart climate model, as it has surmounted the entry barriers of traditional models, which consume longer periods for processing and produce very huge amounts of output. Whereas traditional models require massive processing power for simulations and data storage, the emulator predicts the climate with small datasets through advanced algorithms thus reducing energy requirements in simulation.
This produces better and faster predictions for climate events such as floods, hurricanes, and heat waves. It also produces localized climate prediction data, giving alerts for disasters and optimizing farming techniques.
According to Dr. Khalid, the development might do quite a lot to save Pakistan from the clutches of climate change.