Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN, and IBM Team Advances to Finals for Prestigious Gordon Bell Prize

A team of researchers from Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN, and IBM has been named as a finalist for the prestigious ACM Gordon Bell Prize for simulating the largest biologically meaningful molecules ever modeled with quantum computers.

The team's achievement, published in May 2026, involved calculating the electronic structure of two large protein complexes using the IBM Quantum Heron processors running within the IBM quantum computers at Cleveland Clinic and RIKEN. The calculations were executed alongside two of the world's most powerful supercomputers, Fugaku at RIKEN and Miyabi-G.

The team was able to report the first-known simulation of a 303-atom protein achieved with quantum computers, and less than a year later, they scaled their method roughly 40 times while also achieving 210 times improvement in accuracy. The results reflect the team's innovative approach alongside the rapid maturation of quantum computing.

The ACM Gordon Bell Prize recognizes outstanding achievement in high-performance computing, and the winner will be announced at the International Conference for High-Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC26) in November 2026.