Dr. Syed Bahauddin Alam, Assistant Professor in the Department of Nuclear, Plasma & Radiological Engineering (NPRE) from The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, in collaboration with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), recently received the 2025 HPCwire Editors’ Choice Award in the “Energy” category for work in nuclear digital twins and AI-enabled virtual sensing. It was awarded at the Supercomputing Conference (SC25) in St. Louis, MO.
The HPCwire Editors’ Choice Awards honor the most significant breakthroughs and the best and brightest minds in supercomputing worldwide. While Readers’ Choice Awards reflect community voting, Editors’ Choice Awards are selected by a closed international panel of HPC experts through a formal evaluation process. This recognition marks the first time Grainger Engineering has received this prestigious global honor in the Energy category, and it highlights the leadership of the Department of Nuclear, Plasma & Radiological Engineering in advancing AI and high-performance computing for nuclear energy applications.
The award recognizes research that leveraged NCSA’s premier supercomputing systems, Delta and DeltaAI, to develop novel artificial intelligence models capable of monitoring inaccessible regions of nuclear energy systems. These advances enable real-time virtual sensing and digital twin-based diagnostics, enhancing the safety and operational efficiency of next-generation nuclear technologies.
With this award, UIUC joins an elite group of global Energy category honorees, including NVIDIA, Stanford University, Caltech, Berkeley Lab, San Diego Supercomputer Center, and leading international supercomputing centers such as Leibniz Supercomputing Centre and CINECA.
“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,” Alam said. “We leveraged Delta and DeltaAI’s state-of-the-art supercomputing resources, including computational nodes with NVIDIA A100 and GH200 GPUs, to train and test our models efficiently.”
The project reflects a close interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers in NPRE and NCSA. Key contributors include Kazuma Kobayashi and Farid Ahmed (NPRE) and Diab Abueidda, Seid Koric, and Jaewan Park (NCSA).
“This award is a remarkable milestone for our department and the Grainger College of Engineering," said Rizwan Uddin, NPRE professor and department head. "Dr. Alam’s work exemplifies how NPRE is leading at the intersection of nuclear energy, artificial intelligence, and high-performance computing, translating cutting-edge research into real-world impact.
“Being recognized by HPCwire with an Editors’ Choice Award—especially as the first Grainger Engineering honor in this category—highlights the power of our partnership with NCSA and the global impact of NPRE’s research in AI-enabled nuclear technologies.”
“On behalf of NCSA and the research teams involved, I am humbled to receive these HPCwire awards,” said Koric, NCSA senior technical associate director and professor of Mechanical Science and Engineering. “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 world-class computational resources such as Delta and DeltaAI.”
This award highlights UIUC’s growing leadership at the intersection of high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and nuclear energy and reinforces NPRE's role as a driver of HPC-enabled innovation within The Grainger College of Engineering.
Dr. Alam was appointed to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) committee on Foundation Models for Scientific Discovery and Innovation: Opportunities Across the Department of Energy. He has been named as the National AI leader in the University of Illinois’s official response to White House AI Action Plan.