On the afternoon of September 8th, Tsinghua University held the 2022 Teacher's Day Celebration Conference with the theme of “Welcoming the 20th CPC National Congress and Nurturing Root and Soul to Cultivate New People”, in which individuals and collectives with outstanding achievements in teaching and education were commended. The "Computational Geoscience Team" of the Department of Earth System Science (DESS) won the honor of "Tsinghua University Advanced Collective" in 2021.

Since its inception, the DESS of Tsinghua University has been pursuing the interdisciplinary studies of earth science and information technology as an important direction of development. By far, of the full-time faculty members, five teachers have a research background on computer science, who focus their research on high-performance computing of Earth system science, big data and artificial intelligence, information infrastructure, Earth system model and coupler, etc., having scored outstanding achievements in the research and development of domestic independent Earth system models, the construction of software tools and information infrastructure supporting the research and development of the models, and the exploration of new technologies based on artificial intelligence and quantum computing.

The team members’ independent innovations in ocean and sea ice models, and couplers, among others, have been successfully integrated into the joint earth system model CIESM developed by Tsinghua, which strongly supports the development of China's earth system models. Meanwhile, they have been actively promoting the co-construction of "Earth System Numerical Simulation Facility", a major national science and technology infrastructure project in the 12th Five-Year Plan, and have successfully developed the Super Simulation Support and Management System (SSSMS).

The highly scalable quantum computing simulator based on Sunway Supercomputer developed by our team in collaboration with the Zhijiang Laboratory, the Wuxi National Supercomputing Center and other institutes, won the 2021 Gordon Bell Prize, the highest international award in the field of supercomputing application, with the highest mixed precision floating-point computing performance known in the world by far and a new algorithm that challenged the quantum hegemony of Sycamore for the first time, establishing a preliminary simulation foundation for the future application of quantum computing technology in the field of Earth system simulation. C-Coupler, an independent intellectual property coupler independently developed by the team members, has been widely used in China's model development, successfully applied to 11 coupling models in the China Meteorological Bureau (the National Meteorological Center, the National Climate Center, and the Earth System Numerical Forecasting Center), the Ministry of Natural Resources (the National Marine Environment Center, and the First Institute of Oceanography), the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, a PLA unit, Tsinghua University and other units. The core components of the Earth observation remote sensing satellite image aggregation search system and the Global Integrated Earth Observation System (GEOSS) built by the team members have supported global visits from 121 countries and regions.

Team photo

Award Presentation at the Conference

Dean Luo Yong (left) takes a photo with team leader Fu Haohuan (right).