Sometimes “super” just isn’t super enough. While the world’s classical supercomputers continue to get more powerful, with several on track to approach exascale status–capable of more than 1 quintillion calculations per second–in the coming years, an increasing number of supercomputing centers around the globe are looking for a quantum boost.
The latest example is the STFC Hartree Centre in Warrington, U.K., which has been called one of the European continent’s largest supercomputing centers. Hartree just announced an agreement with Quantinuum, the quantum computer developer that is majority-owned by industrial giant Honeywell, under which the Hartree Centre user community will gain cloud and on-premises access to Quantinuum’s next-generation Helios quantum computer.
Quantinuum plans to deploy a Helios machine on-site at the Hartree Centre next year, and though the quantum computer will not be physically linked to the classical supercomputer on-premises at Hartree, a Quantinuum spokesperson told Fierce Electronics the two machines “will collaborate on applications by distributing specific instruction sets between the quantum processing unit (QPU) and the high-performance computing (HPC) systems.”
Hybrid quantum-classical HPC systems have become a topic of increasing interest and research in recent months, as researchers look to quantum-powered simulations to advance work being done on classical supercomputers, and even to potentially tackle some problems that have proven too challenging for classical HPCs to handle. The Hartree agreement is not even Quantinuum’s first such agreement, as it was chosen by Japanese research giant RIKEN earlier this year to deploy an H-Series machine to fuel RIKEN’s efforts to explore integrated quantum-classical computing architectures.
IBM also is seeing its new Quantum System Two machine figure into hybrid quantum-classical computing for some institutions, and just a couple of months ago, Boston quantum computing start-up QuEra Computing said its own machine would be deployed adjacent to a new Nvidia-powered supercomputer.
“This is a global trend, with the combination of quantum, HPC and AI showing great promise,” the Quantinuum spokesperson said. “In partnering with Quantinuum, STFC will be among the first HPC centers where we are tackling complex challenges that can no longer be simulated by classical computers.
The spokesperson added that such deployments are being driven by a need “to build domestic and international ecosystems, bringing together business, academia, and developers to seek new solutions to previously intractable problems. This is further propelled by the fact that certain problems across key industries remain too complex for supercomputers, and require a quantum computer to work in tandem.”
Kate Royse, Director of the STFC Hartree Centre, observed, “Quantinuum’s H-Series hardware will benefit scientists across various areas of research, including exascale computing algorithms, fusion energy development, climate resilience and more. This partnership also furthers our five-year plan to unlock the high growth potential of advanced digital technologies for U.K. industry.”