QRUCH : Quantum Resources for Unified Computing Hub

Quantum Computing is not a completely new topic: it was introduced in 1981 during a conference at MIT, but it really came under the spotlight as Peter Shor released his famous algorithm capable of breaking RSA encryption with tremendous acceleration. The domain remained a bit theoretical, studied in mathematical computer science, until a few years ago when actual Quantum Computers arrived on the market providing real (but yet limited) quantum computing resources.
In the very last years, Quantum Computers gained more computing power, and they started to be deployed inside HPC centers while also becoming available on cloud based platforms.

As Quantum Computers leave the laboratories where they were designed and enter the HPC machine room, it becomes necessary to consider how they can be used to perform actual computation on real life use cases. As we are still in the NISQ era, and because HPC resources may help in using Quantum Computers efficiently, the hybrid HPC/QC naturally appeared, providing acceleration similarly to GPU previously.

This is not as easy as it seems. As the hardware becomes ready to be installed in computer rooms, the software stack has not evolved as fast. In particular, the required software stack to “glue” HPC and QC is not fully defined. Solutions exist and are provided by both research institutes and vendors, but they obey no standard.

Current Quantum Computers are provided with a very simple software stack, usually a Python based framework, providing native access to the computing resources as well as a “mock device” providing emulation on standard CPU (and sometimes GPU) compute power. As we consider the integration inside the computer center, many topics, related to system integration as well as application integration are to be considered, such as: authentication and accounting, job scheduling, abstraction across different qubit modalities, benchmarking, programming interface, communication programming interfaces for management.
This “half a day” workshop will address some of these topics as it aims to depict the available pieces of software that will help in integrating an actual quantum computer inside a machine room, making it available to end users.

This workshop is a follow-up to the BoF “Towards Hardware Agnostic Standards in Hybrid HPC/Quantum Computing” at ISC’24.

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Organizers:

• Philippe Deniel
• Suzanne Talon
• Venkatesh Kannan
• Ariana Torres