From Qubits to Breakthroughs: The Path to Practical Quantum Applications

In its nascent NISQ-era state, quantum computing offers interesting and potentially useful alternatives to conventional computational approaches. Within multiscale and multiphysics problems, which abound in current complex condensed matter systems within both the life and materials sciences, one faces the challenge of studying sizeable quantities of matter using a combination of length and time scales in which different laws of physics apply. At the smallest length and time scales, where quantum mechanics rules, particularly challenging parts of a system may be best studied via computations performed on quantum processing units coupled directly to nodes on a supercomputer. These QPUs effectively act as accelerators in a similar way to GPUs. This session takes a look at such hybrid computing architectures and the kind of applications we can expect to run on them.