Department of Energy Secretary’s Honor Award Winner

Sandia’s Mark Taylor is the chief computational scientist for the Department of Energy’s Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME) executive council team. (Photo by Randy Montoya)

The Energy Secretary selected the Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME) executive council team to receive a 2014 Honor Award. The ACME executive council team includes researchers

• William Collins from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,
• David Bader from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and
• Mark Taylor from Sandia National Laboratories (in our Multiphysics Applications Dept.).

ACME is designed to accelerate developing and applying fully coupled, state-of-the-science Earth system models for scientific and energy applications—exploiting advanced software and new high-performance computing machines as they become available to develop the most sophisticated Earth system model to date for climate change research with scientific and energy applications.

The Secretary’s Honor award recognizes the team’s work to unify the DOE’s climate modeling research community. Integration of DOE’s many efforts to develop atmosphere, land, ocean and sea-ice models will enable development of a fully coupled climate-system computational simulation with ultra-high resolution. This model will better serve the department’s energy and science missions. Expected to be available in 2017, the ACME model will be used to address the most difficult questions that climate scientists face.

Said Taylor, “Sandia will play a leading role by contributing our expertise in high-performance computing, uncertainty quantification and software engineering best practices. I’m honored to be part of this exciting project.”

The Secretary’s Honor Awards represent the highest level of nonmonetary recognition given to DOE federal and contractor employees. The award was presented May 7 in Washington, D.C.

The ACME project is sponsored by the Office of Science.

Read the Sandia news release.