Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN and IBM Team Advance to Finals for 2026 ACM Gordon Bell Prize

Insider Brief

• Cleveland Clinic Clinic, RIKEN and IBM researchers were named finalists for the 2026 ACM Gordon Bell Prize after using quantum and classical computers to simulate biologically meaningful molecular systems containing as many as 12,635 atoms.
• The team combined IBM Quantum Heron processors with the Fugaku, Miyabi-G and ROQUO supercomputers to calculate protein structures and binding energies.
• The approach could help researchers model how potential medicines interact with protein targets while reducing computational demands, manual data transfers and errors.

PRESS RELEASE — A multidisciplinary team from Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN and IBM (NYSE: IBM) has been named as a finalist for the 2026 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Gordon Bell Prize for simulating the largest biologically meaningful molecules ever modeled with quantum computers, reaching a scale of 12,635 atoms. To achieve these results, the team united the strengths of quantum and classical computing methods in a framework known as quantum-centric supercomputing.

The ACM Gordon Bell Prize recognizes outstanding achievement in high-performance computing and is one of the field’s most prestigious honors. The 2026 winner will be announced at the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC26), taking place Nov. 15–20, 2026 in Chicago.