Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN, IBM named Gordon Bell finalists

• Quantum Research
• Blog

Date

9 Sep 2026

Authors

Robert Davis

Key takeaways:

• Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN, and IBM were named 2026 ACM Gordon Bell Prize finalists for breakthrough quantum-HPC chemistry research.
• The collaboration demonstrated the largest known quantum-enabled simulation of biologically relevant molecules, modeling a 12,635-atom protein system.
• IBM Quantum Heron processors were integrated with supercomputers “Fugaku,” “ROQUO” (RIKEN), and “Miyabi-G” (University of Tokyo).
• New research from the collaboration shows fully automated end-to-end workflow, reducing manual coordination and data movement across quantum and classical resources.
• Improved protein-ligand binding energy calculations demonstrate progress toward scaling quantum-centric supercomputing for increasingly complex molecular systems.
• Read the IBM Research press release to learn more.

The research team behind the 12,635-atom protein simulation demonstrated by Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN, and IBM earlier this year has been named a finalist for the 2026 ACM Gordon Bell Prize, one of the highest honors in high-performance computing. First announced in May, that work represents the largest known quantum-enabled simulation of biologically relevant molecules, and was made possible by combining Cleveland Clinic’s expertise in computational chemistry with IBM Quantum Heron processors and RIKEN’s high-performance computing experts using the supercomputers “Fugaku,” “ROQUO” (RIKEN), and Miyabi-G (University of Tokyo).

The Gordon Bell finalist announcement arrives as the research team reports additional progress beyond its previous results. In a new arXiv paper, the team introduces a fully automated end-to-end workflow running on RIKEN's “ROQUO”—a new JHPC-Quantum GPU supercomputer.

By automating a process that previously required significant manual coordination and data movement across multiple computing resources and organizations, the workflow reduces operational complexity and accelerates time to solution. The researchers also report improved accuracy for calculations of protein-ligand binding energy, producing results that better reflect expected binding behavior in benchmark systems.

Together, these advances could help researchers study more proteins, evaluate more experimental conditions, and scale to increasingly complex molecular systems. At a higher level, the recent developments also underscore how coordinated quantum and classical computing resources can accelerate scientific discovery.

Read the IBM Research press release to learn more about the Gordon Bell finalist recognition and the latest advances in quantum-centric supercomputing from Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN, and IBM.