Preview: Supercomputing Conference 2025

Under the motto "HPC accelerates," the Supercomputing Conference (SC'25) will take place in St. Louis, USA, from November 16 to 21, 2025. This year, the world's leading event in the field of high-performance computing (HPC) expects more than 18,000 participants from research, industry, and government.

The focus will be on current developments, best practices, and future trends in algorithms, architectures, networks, cloud and distributed computing, data analysis, visualization, and storage. Other key areas include artificial intelligence (AI), system software, programming systems, and performance optimization. The DKRZ team will also contribute to the scientific program and will present current work and projects.

In the „ACM Gordon Bell Finalists Presentations“ session on November 18, 2025, the finalists for the prestigious Gordon Bell Prize will present their work, and the winners will be announced. Two of the nominated projects were developed with the participation of the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) and are based on new, particularly high-resolution configurations of the ICON climate model. These configurations make it possible to simulate climate change over decades with a resolution in the kilometer range on the world's most powerful supercomputers.

In the talk „Destination Earth: The Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin“, a team of the DKRZ and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M), presents a new ICON configuration that can simulate the entire Earth system, including the energy, water, and carbon cycles, with a resolution of one kilometer over several decades.

The second nominated talk, „Computing the Full Earth System at 1 km Resolution“, presents results from the European project Destination Earth with ICON, in which the DKRZ and the MPI-M are also involved. The project aims to develop digital twins of the Earth system that serve as a basis for climate change adaptation and make climate information directly usable.

Even a nomination for the $10,000 Gordon Bell Prize is considered a significant recognition of outstanding achievements in high-performance computing. The prize is awarded annually by the Association for Computing Machinery and, since 2023, has also included a category of "Climate Modeling" to honor innovations that advance our understanding of the climate system and climate change.

Also on November 18, Florian Ziemen from the DKRZ will speak as a member of a five-person panel on the topic of „Cyberinfrastructure for Petascale Earth System Data“. Because climate simulations generate enormous amounts of data, conventional storage and analysis methods are reaching their limits. The panel will address which new approaches—such as network-friendly datasets, resolution hierarchies, and machine learning—and software packages are needed to efficiently utilize the resulting massive datasets and enable their use outside of large data centers.

Further information can be found on the official SC'25 website: https://sc25.supercomputing.org/