An Australian research team and their American collaborators have been awarded the 2024 Gordon Bell Prize, regarded as the ‘Nobel Prize’ of high-performance computing (HPC).

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.

The Prize acknowledges the team’s breakthrough research: “Breaking the Million-Electron and 1 EFLOP/s Barriers: Biomolecular-Scale Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics Using MP2 Potentials.”

Established in 1987 and funded by American pioneer in high-performance and parallel computing Gordon Bell, the prize recognises the Australian team’s development of the first quantum-accurate simulation of biological systems at the scale needed to accurately model drug performance.

The software will enable new drugs to be developed faster and cheaper and for diseases that have — so far — been too difficult to treat.

Read more via the University of Melbourne Newsroom