CITA Fellow James Beattie and Team Win Top Supercomputing Honour
A team led by CITA Fellow, Dr. James Beattie, received the HPCwire Editors’ Choice Award for “Top HPC-Enabled Scientific Achievement” for 2025. The researchers were recognized for creating the largest and highest-resolution simulation of astrophysical, magnetized turbulence performed to date. “Using HPC resources at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ), they were able to model turbulence in the ISM in unprecedented detail, calling long-held assumptions of the role of magnetic turbulence into question and providing new research directions for next-generation experiments in space”.
The HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards are among the most prestigious international recognitions in high-performance computing (HPC). Presented annually at the Supercomputing Conference, they celebrate exceptional achievements across scientific discovery, technological innovation, and real-world impact enabled by advanced computing in the last 12 months. Winners are selected through a dual process: open global voting by the HPCwire readership and independent selections by the publication’s editorial board, representing the combined voice of the worldwide HPC community. The awards highlight the year’s most influential breakthroughs in HPC, AI, data-intensive science, and emerging computing technologies.
The distinction received by Beattie and his team highlights how the computational tools at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) have enabled them to tackle a problem far beyond the reach of conventional, modern computation. For the first time, beautiful turbulence images allow a glimpse into unknown worlds. They illustrate the chaotic processes and movements of star-forming gases, challenge previous assumptions about the role of magnetic turbulence and show where research for further space experiments could begin.
We warmly congratulate the core team around James Beattie, Christoph Federrath, Ralf S. Klessen, Salvo Cielo and Amitava Bhattarcharjee on this sensational success, which has provided us with some valuable insights from space.
In addition to the scientific achievement, the award also acknowledges the years-long international collaboration behind it – a collaboration that includes researchers from the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, Princeton University, the Australian National University, Harvard & Smithsonian CfA, Heidelberg University, and the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Read more about the achievement of the team on the LRZ’s website, which also links to the original article in Nature Magazine.