SCC researcher Dr. Marie Weiel has been awarded the Golden Spike Award 2026 by the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS). The award-winning project, “On the Scalability of Distributed Random Forests,” was carried out in close collaboration with doctoral researcher Katharina Flügel, whose practical research work made a substantial contribution to the results. In their project, Marie Weiel and Katharina Flügel investigate how machine learning methods can be efficiently scaled on distributed high-performance computing systems. Their research addresses a key challenge of modern data-driven science: enabling the productive use of increasingly large AI models on ever-growing datasets running on supercomputers.
The Golden Spike Award recognizes outstanding computational research in the fields of particle physics, computational fluid dynamics, and computer science. It was presented during the 29th Results and Review Workshop on October 8, 2026.
In addition to Marie Weiel, Dr. Andrey Kotov of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre and Adrian Kummerländer of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology also received a Golden Spike Award.
The Results and Review Workshop is held annually at HLRS. In 2026, participants presented their research projects and results in 20 talks and a poster session. From all submissions, the HLRS Steering Committee selected three particularly outstanding research projects for the Golden Spike Award. The evaluation criteria included scientific relevance, the necessity of using high-performance computing resources, optimizations in the utilization of computing resources, and the quality of the presentation at the workshop.
Contact at SCC: Dr. Marie Weiel
More about the research project:
[1] K. Flügel, C. Debus, M. Götz, A. Streit & M. Weiel (2025). Scaling Laws of Distributed Random Forests. Transactions on Machine Learning Research. www.doi.org/10.5445/IR/1000187481
Code: github.com/Helmholtz-AI-Energy/special-couscous