Oak Ridge lab bags $125M to bolt quantum onto supercomputers
The DoE’s planned funding runs through 2030
America's Oak Ridge National Laboratory will receive up to $125 million through 2030 to develop hybrid computing systems that link quantum and supercomputing technologies.
The federally funded research center in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, has secured planned funding from the Department of Energy (DoE) over five years to research hybrid computing architectures that meld quantum computers with classical high-performance computing (HPC) systems.
Strictly speaking, the funding is for the Quantum Science Center (QSC), headquartered at Oak Ridge, which will coordinate efforts with other national labs, universities, and industry partners.
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The research will focus on five areas: the design of quantum-accelerated high-performance computing (QHPC) architectures, developing an open software system for these, quantum algorithms, scientific applications that can use fault-tolerant quantum computers, and an experimental database for validating such applications against real-world materials.
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According to Oak Ridge, the research will cover quantum systems using several different technologies, including those based on transmons, neutral atoms and trapped ions. This is most likely because quantum is still at an early phase of development and nobody can be sure which technology will prove best.
The convergence of HPC and quantum is one of those goals that could potentially pay off if it can be made to work. The notion is that quantum processors can help speed calculations and cut the time required to complete HPC simulations, effectively becoming part of the workflow in a hybrid system.
In other supercomputing news, IBM says that the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center has used IBM Fusion to implement Nvidia's AI Data Platform reference design in order to support medical research.
Fusion is a platform that integrates AI, container and virtual machine workloads with automated orchestration, and is available as software or deployed on hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI). In this case, the infrastructure also features Nvidia networking and RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell Server Edition GPUs.
Specific areas of use will include drug discovery and AI-driven patient avatars, IBM said.
"Bringing quantum and high-performance computing together will redefine what's possible in science and technology. The Quantum Science Center is charting that future," commented Gina Tourassi, associate laboratory director for ORNL's Computing and Computational Sciences Directorate.
This isn't the first effort at bridging quantum and supercomputing – Oak Ridge itself announced a project last year with a company called Quantum Brilliance that uses diamond-based hardware to produce room-temperature quantum systems.
Its current list of partners includes IBM, Atom Computing, QuEra, IonQ, plus Caltech, Los Alamos National Laboratory, UC Berkeley, and Purdue University.
In fact, Oak Ridge isn't the only research center to get $125 million toward quantum projects. Argonne National Laboratory and its Q-NEXT center will cover quantum information science and technology, as will the Brookhaven National Laboratory with its Co-design Center for Quantum Advantage (C2QA). The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is also getting funds for its Quantum Systems Accelerator (QSA), as will Fermilab's Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems (SQMS) Center. ®