ST. LOUIS, MO Nov. 17, 2025 —HPCwire, the leading publication for news and information for the high performance computing industry, announced the winners of the 2025 HPCwireReaders’ and Editors’ Choice Awards at the Supercomputing Conference (SC25) taking place this week in St. Louis, Missouri. Tom Tabor, CEO of TCI Media, which publishes HPCwire, unveiled the list of 92 winners across 23 categories just before the opening gala reception.
“While the early advances in applying AI to science and engineering are producing exciting and impressive results, traditional HPC continues to drive breakthrough discoveries for mission-critical workloads and applications,” said Tabor. “The 2025 Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards truly capture this dynamic era of innovation.”
Across the globe, grand challenge problems are being tackled — and often solved — thanks to HPC, now amplified and accelerated by AI. Yet, many of these remarkable achievements rarely receive the recognition they deserve for their impact on society. With input from our worldwide community of HPC experts and the industry’s most respected editorial panel, the Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards stand as a powerful acknowledgment of the depth and diversity of HPC accomplishments worldwide. We extend our sincere gratitude and warmest congratulations to all of this year’s winners,” added Tabor.
“Each year, HPCwire readers and our editorial team select the technologies, use cases, companies, and leaders that have contributed to the fantastic growth of the HPC market and community,” said Alex Woodie, Managing Editor of HPCwire. “These remarkable submissions come from around the globe and represent the best people, projects, collaborations, and technology in the supercomputing community.”
HPCwire has designated two categories of awards: (1) Readers’ Choice, where winners have been elected by HPCwire readers, and (2) Editors’ Choice, where winners have been selected by a panel of HPCwire editors and thought leaders in HPC. The process started with an open nomination process, with voting taking place throughout the month of September.
These awards, now in their 22nd year, are widely recognized as being among the most prestigious recognition given by the HPC community to its own each year, and are the only awards that open voting to a worldwide audience of end users.
The 2025 HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Award winners are:
Best Use of HPC in Life Sciences
Readers’ Choice:
Researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and the University of Florida used the Expanse HPC system at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) to make a groundbreaking discovery about the characterization of hemodynamics in blood vessel sprouts. The work created a foundation for better understanding and prediction of how new blood vessels grow.
Editors’ Choice:
A University of Pittsburgh team has simulated the HIV-1 virus to show how a twist in a critical protein may help it squeeze into a host cell’s nuclear pore, causing infection. The research team’s simulations yielded encouraging results, suggesting that simulations can pair with experiments to find new targets for HIV drugs or vaccines.
Best Use of HPC in Physical Sciences
Readers’ Choice:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), UC San Diego/Scripps, and UT Austin built a real-time tsunami digital twin using using the HPE Cray supercomputer El Capitan and TACC systems Frontera, Lonestar6, Stampede3, and Vista. The system turns ocean pressure sensor data and physics-based models into localized forecasts in under 0.2 seconds, which is about 10 billion times faster than traditional methods. This achievement cuts false alarms and speeds credible warnings.
Editors’ Choice:
An international team of researchers used data from the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and simulations on supercomputers, including Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC)’s Bridges-2 and San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)’s Expanse, to identify and date three brown dwarfs in a globular cluster for the first time.
Best HPC Response to Societal Plight
Readers’ Choice:
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC)’s Societal Computing and Innovation Lab (SCIL) takes a novel approach to creating breakthrough technological innovations to meet complex societal challenges with a commitment to real-world solutions that leverage integrated workflows, next-generation data and AI, cutting-edge science, and advanced digital infrastructure. A defining feature of SCIL is its Immersion Studio, which leverages the AI-readiness of scientific data to power new modes of teaching, training, decision-making, and public engagement.
Editors’ Choice:
BurkinaBioinfo (BBi) established the first dedicated bioinformatics HPC platform in Burkina Faso, enabling local and regional scientists to process complex genomic data to address pressing challenges in health, agriculture, and biodiversity. BBi has trained over 280 scientists from seven West African countries, enhanced regional capacity to respond to disease outbreaks, improved crop resilience research, and reduced dependency on external facilities for data analysis.
Best Use of HPC in Energy
Readers’ Choice:
Two graduate students from Tennessee State University leveraged U.S. National Science Foundation ACCESS resources on Jetstream2 to reveal how biochar and optimized nitrogen use can improve soil health, reduce emissions, and support sustainable biofuel production. This research points toward scalable agricultural practices that can cut greenhouse gas emissions, reduce farmer reliance on costly fertilizers, and strengthen bioenergy and food security for society at large.
Editors’ Choice:
Researchers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign developed a deep learning operator, based on a virtual sensing digital twin and trained on the NVIDIA GH200-powered DeltaAI HPC cluster, to monitor inaccessible nuclear reactor locations in real time. The work delivers predictions of critical and previously unmeasurable parameters 1,400× faster than traditional simulations, surpassing the limits of conventional sensors and AI methods.
Best Use of HPC in Industry (Automotive, Aerospace, Manufacturing, Chemical, etc.)
Readers’ Choice:
The NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory selected Microchip’s PIC64-HPSC for its High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) platform. The platform delivers deterministic and fault-tolerant HPC, onboard AI, advanced sensor fusion, and autonomous decision-making to aerospace missions.
Editors’ Choice:
Researchers from the University of Illinois, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), and National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) have developed a novel generative AI model, trained on NCSA’s Delta system. The model enables inverse design of complex patterned polymers by rapidly generating multiple high-fidelity manufacturing solutions from desired pattern images, and advances AI-driven materials design through HPC.
Best Use of HPC in Financial Services
Readers’ Choice:
Cornell University leveraged U.S. National Science Foundation ACCESS allocations on Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)’s Stampede3 to model how debt relief design and mortgage firm behavior shaped the U.S. foreclosure crisis. This produced insights that earned international recognition in regulatory economics.
Editors’ Choice:
Jump Trading leverages DDN’s 400NVX2 QLC systems to empower quantitative analysts to operate independently. By decreasing processing latency by 10x and enabling instant results, Jump Trading has dramatically increased quant productivity and innovation, giving the firm a decisive competitive advantage in high-frequency trading.
Best Use of High Performance Data Analytics & Artificial Intelligence
Readers’ Choice:
Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Saudi Aramco-Dhahran, and Aramco Americas-Detroit developed a generative deep learning and artificial intelligence framework for accelerated inverse molecular design of novel high-performance transportation fuels. The proposed data-driven framework streamlines innovative fuel design processes and addresses the limitations of traditional methods by harnessing the power of generative AI and HPC.
Editors’ Choice:
Researchers at the European Institute of Oncology and the Monzino Cardiology Center are creating predictive, prognostic, and diagnostic computational models based on the interactions of protein structures. The project is expected to improve the development of therapies and treatments through the identification of potential molecular candidates and interaction mechanisms using AI, leading to greater efficiency in healthcare activities.
Best HPC Storage Product or Technology
Readers’ Choice:
VAST DataStore (VAST AI OS)
Editors’ Choice:
Swiss Vaults “VaultFS”
Best AI Product or Technology
Readers’ Choice:
NVIDIA GB300 NVL72
Editors’ Choice:
Cerebras Systems Inference
Best Use of AI Methods for Augmenting HPC Applications
Readers’ Choice:
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and several National Meteorological Services across Europe have developed Anemoi – a portable, scalable, open-source framework for building AI-driven weather and climate applications. Designed to efficiently create AI-ready datasets and enable model training and inference on diverse HPC architectures, including EuroHPC systems, Anemoi powers the next generation of AI weather and climate models, including within the EU’s Destination Earth initiative to advance climate adaptation and resilience.
Editors’ Choice:
University of Birmingham researchers have developed a high-throughput biodiversity screening kit, now being adapted for in-field use, that enables real-time, high-resolution monitoring of community biodiversity. The effort leverages the University’s BlueBEAR cluster (Lenovo, with Intel CPUs and IBM Storage Scale), including NVIDIA A100 GPUs and HPC, to process terabytes of biodiversity and environmental data.
Best Use of HPC in the Cloud (Use Case)
Readers’ Choice:
The U.S. National Science Foundation-funded Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project at the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) provides in-depth support to research groups. The effort concentrates on using the NVIDIA DGX cloud platform with a focus on optimization of system setups, performance monitoring, and determining the best ways to run National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) pilot projects on the resources.
Editors’ Choice:
GDIT, in support of a large federal agency, collaborated with Parallel Works’ ACTIVATE to move complex, mission-critical HPC workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS). Moving from traditional on-premises systems to AWS cloud infrastructure, the team maintained extreme reliability and performance standards required for life-saving weather forecasting operations. The success of this effort demonstrates that mission-critical weather forecasting can reliably transition from traditional HPC systems to cloud infrastructure.
Best HPC Cloud Platform
Readers’ Choice:
Amazon Web Services
Editors’ Choice:
Google Cloud
Best HPC Server Product or Technology
Readers’ Choice:
HPE Cray Supercomputing EX4000
Editors’ Choice:
NextSilicon Maverick-2 Accelerator
Best HPC Programming Tool or Technology
Readers’ Choice:
NVIDIA Warp
Editors’ Choice:
Spack 1.0
Best HPC Interconnect Product or Technology
Readers’ Choice:
NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand Networking Platform
Editors’ Choice:
HPE Slingshot Interconnect
Best HPC Collaboration (Academia/Government/Industry)
Readers’ Choice:
The High-Performance Software Foundation (HPSF) brings together collaborators from industry, academia, and government to help sustain performant, portable HPC software projects. HPSF sponsors activities that enable collaboration among members and projects. In its inaugural year, it established a formal governance structure and spawned working groups around HPC-focused continuous integration (CI) and benchmarking.
Editors’ Choice:
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and VAST have come together with the Doudna project, which traU.S. National Science Foundationorms storage from a static repository into a dynamic, workload-intelligent fabric that seamlessly adapts to the real-time, data-intensive demands of next-generation science. The effort is expected to accelerate breakthroughs across fields like fusion energy, genomics, astrophysics, and quantum simulation by enabling real-time, data-driven discovery at unprecedented scale.
Top Energy-Efficient HPC Achievement
Readers’ Choice:
NVIDIA’s new software technology in cuBLAS doubles the energy efficiency score of any system using the NVIDIA Blackwell B200 accelerator. Specifically, cuBLAS is a GPU-accelerated library that implements the Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) standard for HPC and AI applications on NVIDIA’s GPUx.
Editors’ Choice:
The Simons Foundation is at the forefront of cutting-edge research. It uses direct liquid cooling for multiple clusters in its research, which allows it to provide sustainable compute that ensures the foundation’s mission and focus are interwoven into practical applications, while delivering maximum energy efficiency.
Top HPC-Enabled Scientific Achievement
Readers’ Choice:
The climate model ICON is the central research tool at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI-M). In collaboration with DKRZ, JSC, ETH, CSCS, the University of Hamburg, and NVIDIA, the MPI-M–led ICON team achieved the first global simulation of the full Earth system at 1.25 km resolution, reaching unprecedented time compression and degrees of freedom. This milestone leveraged the GH200 Superchip on Alps and JUPITER, using its CPUs and GPUs to balance Earth’s components in a heterogeneous setup with optimized acceleration in ICON’s codebase.
Editors’ Choice:
A research team focused on better understanding how magnetic fields influence the highly turbulent motions through the interstellar medium (ISM). Using HPC resources at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), the team was able to model turbulence in the ISM in unprecedented detail, calling long-held assumptions of the role of magnetic turbulence into question in the process and providing new research directions for next-generation experiments in space.
Top Supercomputing Achievement
Readers’ Choice:
JUPITER is Europe’s first exascale supercomputer. Designed by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) at Forschungszentrum Jülich in collaboration with EuroHPC JU and procured by EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, JUPITER stands as the first European supercomputer capable of performing one exaflop. It is also the most powerful system in Europe, combining outstanding performance with exceptional energy efficiency.
Editors’ Choice:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) launched El Capitan, the world’s fastest supercomputer (1.742 exaFLOPS HPL, 2.79 exaFLOPS peak) and the first exascale system dedicated to national security. LLNL’s El Capitan achieved a rare “triple crown”, ranking #1 on TOP500 (HPL), HPCG, and HPL-MxP (mixed-precision/AI), demonstrating leadership across real-world and AI workloads. Built with HPE’s Cray EX and AMD Instinct™ MI300A APUs, it delivers massive scale (11M+ cores, ~44K APUs) with strong energy efficiency (58.9 GF/W).
Top 5 New Products or Technologies to Watch
Readers’ Choice:
NVIDIA Quantum-X800 InfiniBand Platform
VAST Data AgentEngine (VAST AI OS)
NVIDIA Warp
AWS Parallel Computing Service Managed Accounting
NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet Platform
Editors’ Choice:
NextSilicon Maverick-2
Warewulf Pro
NVLink Fusion
Ultra Ethernet Consortium-compliant Ethernet
Hammerspace Data Platform
Top 5 Vendors to Watch
Readers’ Choice:
AMD
NVIDIA
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Broadcom
Editors’ Choice:
VAST Data
Intel
HPE
Cerebras Systems Inference
VDURA
Workforce Diversity & Inclusion Leadership Award
Readers’ Choice:
STEM-Trek is a nonprofit whose mission is to advance diversity and inclusion in the HPC workforce by providing travel support, mentoring, and advanced skills training to STEM scholars from underrepresented and underserved backgrounds. Over the past year, STEM-Trek has enabled diverse scholars from across the globe to attend major HPC conferences and training events, paired early-career researchers with experienced mentors, and fostered connections between HPC practitioners and veterans, displaced workers, and other underrepresented groups.
Editors’ Choice:
bp supports women to thrive in their roles, and in turn provides much value to their business. A few great examples are Elizabeth L’heureux, who is their HPC Director, Arianna Martin, who is one of their HPC Engineering Administrator, and Muhong Zhou, who is a Senior HPC Software Engineer. These women play a big role in keeping the Centre for High Performance Computing running smoothly and successfully, which helps to contribute to bp’s success. Additionally, bp has been consistently recognized for its ongoing diversity and inclusion efforts, earning multiple awards over the last decade.
Outstanding Leadership in HPC
Readers’ Choice:
Satoshi Matsuoka, RIKEN
Satoshi Matsuoka has been the director of RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS) since 2018. He is responsible for developing the supercomputer Fugaku, which has become the fastest supercomputer in the world in all four major supercomputer rankings in 2020 and 2021 (TOP500, HPCG, HPL-AI, Graph500). Matsuoka oversees a multitude of ongoing cutting-edge HPC research, including investigating Post-Moore era computing and the future FugakuNEXT supercomputer.
Editors’ Choice:
Katie Antypas, U.S. National Science Foundation
Katie Antypas has led the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Pilot at the U.S. National Science Foundation, effectively bringing together industry, government, and academia to support AI researchers across the country and demonstrating how a national AI research resource could work to accelerate AI research.
More information on these awards can be found at the HPCwire website at https://www.hpcwire.com/2025-hpcwire-awards-readers-editors-choice/ and on Twitter through the hashtag: #HPCwireRCA25
About HPCwire
HPCwire is a news site and weekly newsletter covering the fastest computers in the world and the people who run them. As the trusted source for HPC news since 1987, HPCwire serves as the publication of record on the issues, opportunities, challenges, and community developments relevant to the global High Performance Computing space. Its reporting covers the vendors, technologies, users, and the uses of high performance, AI- and data-intensive computing within academia, government, science, and industry. Subscribe now at www.hpcwire.com.
About TCI Media
TCI Media (formerly Tabor Communications Inc.) is the home of the Wire publications: AIwire, HPCwire, BigDATAwire, and QCwire, which broadly cover Advanced Scale technologies for scientific and technical computing. The Wire publications closely follow the convergence of AI, HPC, and Big Data, and the evolution of Quantum Computing. Together, they unify the IT communities that we serve, providing news, analysis, and information to educate and engage users and decision-makers seeking high performance and advanced scale computing solutions for scientific and technical workloads across AI, HPC, Big Data, and Quantum Computing. More information can be found at www.tci-media.com.
