The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been recognized in the 21st edition of the HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards, presented at the 2024 International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC24), in Atlanta, Georgia.

ORNL won the trade publication’s “Top Supercomputing Achievement” award for 2024 for the Oak Ridge Base AI Foundation Model for Earth System Predictability, or ORBIT, a groundbreaking AI spatiotemporal transformer model with 113 billion parameters that could enable fast, cheap and highly accurate weather forecasts.

Powered by 49,152 AMD GPUs on the Frontier supercomputer, ORBIT achieved a sustained computing performance of 1.6 exaflops.

The work also earned the team a finalist nomination for the Association of Computing Machinery Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modeling, which honors innovations in applying high-performance computing to climate modeling applications.

“We are honored to receive this recognition,” said ORNL’s director of AI Programs Prasanna Balaprakash. “ORBIT represents a significant milestone, breaking the exaflop barrier in training large-scale spatiotemporal AI foundation models for weather prediction — an effort considerably more complex and challenging than training large language models. This achievement is a testament to the dedication of our team at ORNL and our commitment to leveraging high-performance AI to address society’s most complex challenges.”

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