December 01, 2021

Towards a world-class supercomputing ecosystem: Eurice is partner of Europe’s new quantum-supercomputing project HPCQS

As one of 16 consortium partners within the new project “High-Performance Computer and Quantum Simulator hybrid” (HPCQS), Eurice will make its contribution to Europe’s next step into the new era of hybrid quantum-high-performance computing. With the partnership, Eurice will leverage its expertise in this area and further expand its portfolio of quantum projects.

The project sets out to integrate two quantum simulators, each controlling about 100+ qubits (quantum bits) in supercomputers located at the European HPC centers at Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives (France) and at Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany). The seamless integration of quantum hardware with classical computing resources, creating a hybrid system, is an essential step forward to utilize the power of quantum computers for handling first practical applications.

HPCQS will receive a total budget of 12 Mio Euro over the next four years. Prof. Kristel Michielsen of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) is coordinating the project: “Enabling access to the HPCQS infrastructure will leverage the broad knowledge and the emerging technological solutions found in the academic and industrial European ecosystem, supported by experts from European HPC centers,” she explains. “What is more, HPCQS will strengthen on-going efforts in Europe to support quantum start-ups through the adoption of quantum technology by academic institutions and industries.”

Joining the efforts of academia, including research and technology organizations and industry, Europe will foster its future competitiveness by addressing applications related to complex simulations and optimization problems. The latter can be found, for example, in materials and drug design, logistics and transportation as well as many other relevant use cases. HPCQS will play a key role by enabling research entities and industries to exploit the new quantum technologies and find solutions to complex problems.

HPCQS will also work on the deployment of a full hybrid software stack. It will include cloud access, resource management of hybrid workloads, tools and libraries, including benchmarking and certification/performance analysis. Engaging users in co-design will lead to prototype applications in machine learning and scientific simulations, featuring the Variational Quantum Eigensolver (VQE) and the Quantum Approximate Optimization algorithm (QAOA).

Within this ambitious project, Eurice supports in project management and leads communication, dissemination and exploitation activities. “We are looking forward to being part of this exciting new quantum endeavour and bringing our expertise from other quantum projects such as OpenSuperQ or PASQuanS to this new team and task”, comments Jörg Scherer, CEO of Eurice, on his team’s involvement in yet another quantum project. It is a great honour and pleasure for Eurice to contribute through different initiatives to Europe’s first quantum computer that can compete with IBM and Google.

For more information, please visit www.hpcqs.eu.

HPCQS has received funding from the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (JU) under grant agreement No 101018180. The JU receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Ireland and Spain in equal parts.

HPCQS partners

Germany: