Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN, IBM named Gordon Bell finalists
IBM Research
Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN, and IBM are Gordon Bell finalists for a big quantum-HPC chemistry run. Their 12,635-atom protein simulation shows quantum gear starting to matter for real molecular work.
Based on reporting by IBM Research — read the original for the full story.
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Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN, and IBM have been named finalists for the 2026 ACM Gordon Bell Prize for work that pushes quantum and classical computing together on chemistry problems. The recognition follows a simulation the team first announced in May: a 12,635-atom protein system, described as the largest known quantum-enabled simulation of biologically relevant molecules.
That result was built by combining Cleveland Clinic’s computational chemistry expertise with IBM Quantum Heron processors and RIKEN’s high-performance computing work, using the supercomputers Fugaku, RUQUO, and Miyabi-G at the University of Tokyo. The point wasn’t just raw scale. It was showing that these very different machines can be made to work on the same scientific problem.
Now the team says it has gone further. In a new arXiv paper, it describes a fully automated end-to-end workflow running on RIKEN’s ROQUO, a JHPC-Quantum GPU supercomputer. Before that, the process needed a lot of manual coordination and data movement across different resources and organizations. Automation cuts that overhead and speeds up the path to a result.
The researchers also report better protein-ligand binding energy calculations, with results that more closely match expected binding behavior in benchmark systems. That matters because binding energy is one of the places where chemistry gets painfully practical: if the numbers are off, the model is less useful. The broader message here is straightforward. Quantum-centric supercomputing is still young, but this collaboration is showing a cleaner route from hardware stunt to usable science.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the kind of quantum work that deserves attention: not another glossy promise, but a workflow that actually moves data less and does more. The hype crowd loves atom counts; the useful crowd cares about automation and binding energy. That’s the difference between a demo and a tool, and the field could use fewer demos that arrive with their own fog machine.
Read more about this at: IBM Research