The National Center for Supercomputing Applications was recognized for its outstanding achievements in two different domains in the annual HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards announced at Supercomputing Conference 2025 (SC25) in St. Louis on November 17. It’s the 15th consecutive year NCSA has been honored with an HPCwire award.
Both awards centered around research that utilized NCSA’s premier supercomputing systems Delta and DeltaAI. The first team published novel research on using artificial intelligence to monitor inaccessible locations of nuclear energy systems, enhancing their safety and efficiency, and the second created a new tool for improving the manufacturing of polymer materials found in everything from “concrete bridge reinforcements to jet airplane wings to fiberglass boat hulls.”
“NCSA’s commitment to GPU computing with Delta and now DeltaAI has supported innovative research in both quality and quantity, and highlights their versatility to the research computing community,” said NCSA Director Bill Gropp. “These HPCwire awards are just two examples of the excellent work NCSA is helping facilitate in the fields of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.”
These interdisciplinary research collaborations with the Grainger College of Engineering began under Illinois Computes and received vital contributions from NCSA’s Center for Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Industry and Research Consulting groups.
“Massive thanks to Illinois Computes for funding this research. Partnering with Dr. Diab Abueidda and Dr. Seid Koric from NCSA was essential to our success,” said Syed Bahauddin Alam, assistant professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma & Radiological Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “We leveraged Delta and DeltaAI’s state-of-the-art supercomputing resources, including their computational nodes with NVIDIA A100 and GH200 GPUs, to train and test our models efficiently. The NCSA technical staff provided invaluable support throughout the entire process, demonstrating the tremendous impact of combining AI with high-performance computing to advance nuclear safety.”
“On behalf of NCSA and the research teams involved, I am humbled to receive these two HPCwire awards in the energy and manufacturing categories,” said Seid Koric, NCSA senior technical associate director and Mechanical Science and Engineering research professor. “This is excellent recognition of NCSA’s pioneering interdisciplinary research in scientific machine learning in collaboration with the Grainger College of Engineering, which is increasingly translating into real-world impact supported by our world-class computational resources such as Delta and DeltaAI.”
A list of all of the winners can be found on the HPCwire website. NCSA was recognized for:
Editors’ Choice: Best Use of HPC in Energy. 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 times faster than traditional simulations, surpassing the limits of conventional sensors and AI methods.
Editors’ Choice: Best Use of HPC in Industry (Automotive, Aerospace, Manufacturing, Chemical, etc.). Researchers from the University of Illinois, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and the 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.
The coveted annual HPCwire Readers’ Choice Awards are determined through a nomination and voting process with the global HPCwire community, as well as selections from the HPCwire editors. The awards are an annual feature of the publication and constitute prestigious recognition from the HPC community. They are revealed each year to kick off the annual supercomputing conference, which showcases high-performance computing, networking, storage and data analysis.
“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 Tom Tabor, CEO of TCI Media, publishers of HPCwire. “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.
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.
ABOUT NCSA
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing, expertise and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students and collaborators from around the globe use innovative resources to address research challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been assisting many of the world’s industry giants for over 35 years by bringing industry, researchers and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.
ABOUT DELTA AND DELTAAI
NCSA’s Delta and DeltaAI are part of the national cyberinfrastructure ecosystem through the U.S. National Science FoundationACCESS program. Delta (OAC 2005572) is a powerful computing and data-analysis resource combining next-generation processor architectures and NVIDIA graphics processors with forward-looking user interfaces and file systems. The Delta project partners with the Science Gateways Community Institute to empower broad communities of researchers to easily access Delta and with the University of Illinois Division of Disability Resources & Educational Services and the School of Information Sciences to explore and reduce barriers to access. DeltaAI (OAC 2320345) maximizes the output of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) research. Tripling NCSA’s AI-focused computing capacity and greatly expanding the capacity available within ACCESS, DeltaAI enables researchers to address the world’s most challenging problems by accelerating complex AI/ML and high-performance computing applications running terabytes of data. Additional funding for DeltaAI comes from the State of Illinois.