Nvidia teases quantum accelerated supercomputers

Nvidia also announced that national supercomputing centers worldwide will soon receive a performance boost via the open-source Nvidia CUDA-Q platform. The company revealed that sites in Germany, Japan, and Poland will use the platform to power quantum processing units (QPU) in their high performance computing systems.

“Quantum accelerated supercomputing, in which quantum processors are integrated into accelerated supercomputers, represents a tremendous opportunity to solve scientific challenges that may otherwise be out of reach,” said Tim Costa, director, Quantum and HPC at Nvidia. “But there are a number of challenges between us, today, and useful quantum accelerated supercomputing. Today’s qubits are noisy and error prone. Integration with HPC systems remains unaddressed. Error correction algorithms and infrastructure need to be developed. And algorithms with exponential speed up actually need to be invented, among many other challenges.”

To address these issues, he said, more than 25 national quantum initiatives have been launched. There are more than 350 quantum startups, over 70% of the Fortune 500 have some sort of quantum program, and more than 48,000 quantum research papers have been published.