ACM Gordon Bell Prize-Winning Team Develops Revolutionary Simulation for Tsunami Prediction

Innovative “Digital Twin” Yields Ten-Billion-Fold Speedup Over Existing State-of-the-Art Methods

**St. Louis, MO, November 20, 2025 **– ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, named an eight-member team drawn from US institutions as the winner of the 2025 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for their project, “Real-time Bayesian inference at extreme scale: A digital twin for tsunami early warning applied to the Cascadia subduction zone.” The ACM Gordon Bell Prize tracks the progress of parallel computing and rewards innovation in applying high-performance computing to challenges in science, engineering, and large-scale data analytics.

Existing state-of-the art high-performance computing simulations for early tsunami warning are developed primarily through models which process seismic data. The drawbacks of these approaches include: 1) They do not allow for enough warning time, as destructive tsunami waves can arrive onshore in under ten minutes, and 2) They fail to capture the complexities of earthquake ruptures which cause the Tsunamis.

The Gordon Bell Prize-winning team created a far more predictive early warning framework by developing a full-physics Bayesian inversion framework—popularly called “digital twin.” A digital twin is a virtual simulation of a physical process (or object) that uses real-time data from sensors to match its physical counterpart. The digital twin developed by this year’s winning team enables real-time, data-driven tsunami forecasting with dynamic adaptivity to complex source behavior.

With this approach, they achieved the fastest time-to-solution of a partial differential equation (PDE)-based Bayesian inverse problem with 1 billion parameters in 0.2 seconds, a ten-billion-fold speedup over the existing state-of-the-art. This is the largest-to-date unstructured mesh finite element (FE) simulation with 55.5 trillion degrees of freedom (DOF) on 43,520 GPUs, with 92% weak and 79% strong parallel efficiencies in scaling over a 128× increase of GPUs on the full-scale El Capitan system—the world’s largest supercomputer.

The team simulated a Tsunami in an area in the Pacific Ocean called the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which stretches 1000 km from northern California to British Columbia. This area has been eerily quiet for over 300 years—but is considered overdue for a magnitude 8.0–9.0 megathrust earthquake.

The members of the ACM Gordon Bell Prize-Winning team are Stefan Henneking, Sreeram Venkat, Milinda Fernando, and Omar Ghattas (all of The University of Texas at Austin); Veselin Dobrev, John Camier, Tzanio Kolev (all of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory); and Alice-Agnes Gabriel (University of California San Diego).

**Honorable Mention **

This year an Honorable Mention for the ACM Gordon Bell Prize was given to a 10-member team from ETH Zurich for their project “Ab-initio Quantum Transport with the GW Approximation, 42,240 Atoms, and Sustained Exascale Performance.” Team members include Nicolas Vetsch, Alexandros Nikolaos Ziogas, Alexander Maeder, Vincent Maillou, Anders Winka, Jiang Cao, Grzegorz Kwasniewski, Leonard Deutschle (also affiliated with NVIDIA), Torsten Hoefler, and Mathieu Luisier.

The ACM Gordon Bell Prize was presented today during the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis (SC25) in St. Louis, Missouri.

About ACM

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers, and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources, and address the field’s challenges. ACM strengthens the computing profession’s collective voice through strong leadership, promotion of the highest standards, and recognition of technical excellence. ACM supports the professional growth of its members by providing opportunities for life-long learning, career development, and professional networking.

About the ACM Gordon Bell Prize

The ACM Gordon Bell Prize is awarded each year to recognize outstanding achievement in high performance computing. The purpose of this recognition is to track the progress over time of parallel computing, with particular emphasis on rewarding innovation in applying high performance computing to applications in science. The prize is awarded for peak performance as well as special achievements in scalability and time-to-solution on important science and engineering problems and low price/performance. Financial support for the $10,000 awards is provided by Gordon Bell, a pioneer in high performance and parallel computing.