Cleveland – September 12, 2026 -- A research team from Cleveland Clinic, RIKEN and IBM has been named a finalist for the 2026 ACM Gordon Bell Prize after simulating a 12,635-atom protein complex, the largest biologically meaningful molecule ever modeled using quantum computers. The winner will be announced at SC26 in Chicago, running Nov. 15-20, 2026.
Quantum-classical hybrid method scales computation 40-fold in under a year
The team's approach, called quantum-centric supercomputing, combines IBM Quantum Heron processors with classical supercomputers Fugaku and Miyabi-G, operated respectively by RIKEN and a University of Tokyo-University of Tsukuba consortium. The quantum systems executed up to 94 qubits and nearly 6,000 quantum operations on portions of the calculation critical to accuracy, while the classical machines reassembled full molecular representations.
The project began with a May 2026 paper reporting the first quantum simulation of a 303-atom protein, using sample-based quantum diagonalization developed by IBM and RIKEN—featured on the cover of Science Advances—paired with embedded wavefunction methods adapted by Cleveland Clinic. Within less than a year, the team scaled the method roughly 40 times to reach the 12,635-atom system while improving accuracy 210-fold.
September update improves binding-energy accuracy and adds third supercomputer
Results published in September 2026 further refined the accuracy of computed binding energies, which indicate how tightly molecules bind and how they might interact with other biological targets. The team also validated its workflow on ROQUO, RIKEN's newest JHPC-quantum GPU supercomputer, orchestrating CPUs, GPUs and QPUs together to eliminate manual data transfers between systems.
The automated workflow reduced both computational errors and time-to-solution, an early demonstration of classical and quantum hardware operating jointly on a complex scientific problem. The advance targets a core bottleneck in drug discovery: accurately computing the energies of molecular systems as biological processes unfold, a calculation well suited to quantum mechanics-based computers.
The research received support from Japan's New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO), under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's Project for Research and Development of Enhanced Infrastructures for Post 5G Information and Communications Systems (JPNP20017). The full study is available on arXiv.