Oksana Guba, received her PhD in Applied Mathematics from UNM in 2008, her advisor was Jens Lorenz, her thesis was on "The spectra of differential operators on bounded and unbounded domains". After graduation she was a postdoctoral fellow and a contractor at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL). She was also a Research Assistant Professor at UNM 2013-2014 working with Professor Deborah Sulsky (now Emeritus Professor). In 2015 she joined SNL as an Applied Mathematician. Dr. Guba specializes in numerical analysis and software development. More specifically she works on Numerical methods for ODEs/PDEs, finite element methods, algorithm development, scalable algorithms, numerical linear algebra, atmospheric modeling, ice rheology, perturbation theory, and object oriented programming (OOP).

At Sandia Dr. Guba is part of a multi-lab (SNL and seven other national labs) team led by Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) chief computational scientist Mark Taylor (for anyone who happens to know him ;-).

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, presented the nineteen-member E3SM team with the inaugural ACM Gordon Bell Prize for Climate Modelling for their project, “The Simple Cloud-Resolving E3SM Atmosphere Model Running on the Frontier Exascale System.” The new award aims to recognize innovative parallel computing contributions toward solving the global climate crisis. This award is the highest honor in high performance computing.

The E3SM team ran an unprecedented high-resolution global atmosphere model on Frontier. Called the Simple Cloud Resolving E3SM Atmosphere Model (SCREAM), it provides a more accurate representation of cloud processes and their impact on climate change and weather patterns. It is one of the few global atmospheric models that is designed to use GPUs, and the first to run at approximately 3 km scale on an exascale system.

More on the specific work performed by the winning team from Sandia National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, Oak Ridge National Lab, Argonne National Lab.