This year’s Association for Computing Machinery’s Gordon Bell Prize in supercomputing goes to researchers led by the University of Melbourne who used the Frontier supercomputer to conduct a quantum molecular dynamics simulation 1,000 times greater in size and speed than any previous simulation of its kind.

University of Melbourne Associate Professor Giuseppe Barca and his team were named the winners of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Gordon Bell Prize this morning (AEST) at the SC International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis in Atlanta, Georgia.

Appearing as ‘bumps’ in the data from high-energy experiments, these signals came to be known as short-lived ‘XYZ states.’ They defy the standard picture of particle behaviour and are a problem in contemporary physics, sparking several attempts to understand their mysterious nature. But theorists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Virginia, with colleagues from the University of Cambridge, suggest the experimental data could be explained with fewer XYZ states, also called resonances, than currently claimed.

At the SuperComputing 2024 (SC24) conference in Atlanta (GA), from November 17–22, and the European Quantum Technologies Conference in Lisbon (Portugal), from November 18–20, the EuroQCS-France consortium announced plans to grant early remote access to a 6-qubit digital photonic quantum computer developed by Quandela. This initiative aims to support the European research community before the deployment of the Lucy system in France next year.

Quantum Brilliance (QB), a global leader in diamond-based quantum technology, today announced the first purchase of a room temperature quantum accelerator in the European market by Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF (Fraunhofer IAF) following the company’s participation in a public tender.

NEC Corporation has received an order for a next-generation supercomputer system from Japan’s National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology (QST), under the National Research and Development Agency, and the National Institute for Fusion Science (NIFS), part of the National Institutes of Natural Sciences under the Inter-University Research Institute Corporation. The new supercomputer system is scheduled to be operational from July 2025.

In the QSolid collaborative project, Forschungszentrum Jülich and its partners have started operating the first prototype of a quantum computer with optimised qubit quality. It forms the basis of a future quantum computer being developed in Germany using superconducting qubits, which will be able to perform complex calculations for industry and research.

A research team led by Professor Chih-Sung Chuu of the Department of Physics and the Center for Quantum Technology at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) in Taiwan has recently announced that it has successfully developed the world's smallest quantum computer---using only one photon. This is also the first optical quantum computer developed in Taiwan.

The close relationship between AI and high-performance scientific computing can be seen in the fact that both the 2024 Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry were awarded to scientists for their AI-related research contributions in their respective fields of study. KAIST researchers succeeded in dramatically reducing the computation time for highly sophisticated quantum mechanical computer simulations by predicting atomic-level chemical bonding information distributed in 3D space using a novel AI approach.

Yonsei University has established South Korea’s first quantum computing hub, featuring an IBM quantum computer that boasts a remarkable performance of 127 qubits. Housed within a three-meter glass cube and cooled to near absolute zero (−273°C), the cutting-edge quantum processor is IBM’s most powerful machine installed outside the United States. Currently in trial operation, the Quantum Computing Center will officially open on Nov. 20, when the computer will begin full operations.