Following on a global trend toward the deeper collaboration between classical supercomputers and quantum computing resources, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is working with Quantum Brilliance to integrate the start-up’s quantum computing accelerators with ORNL’s advanced supercomputing testbed in Tennessee.
The work the companies are embarking on now eventually could lead toward deeper integration between quantum computers and ORNL’s Frontier supercomputer, which uses AMD processors and is widely considered to currently be the world’s most powerful classical supercomputer.
Quantum computers increasingly are being deployed alongside supercomputers around the world to both speed quantum algorithm research and strengthen the ability of supercomputing centers to tackle previously intractable problems and calculations. Examples of this trend include Japan’s ABCI-Q supercomputer, which is being teamed with a quantum machine from Boston’s QuEra Computing; the Hartree Centre in the U.K. collaborating with Quantinuum; the marriage of Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer and an IBM Quantum System Two; and the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre in Australia deploying a Quantum Brilliance machine.
The Pawsey deployment represented the first time a classical supercomputer was integrated on-premises with a room-temperature, diamond-based quantum computer, and now the ORNL collaboration with Quantum Brilliance, which is based in Australia and Germany, represents the first time that is happening on U.S. soil. Room-temperature quantum computers are thought to have energy consumption and cost benefits over other quantum computers, many of which require large, power-hungry cryogenic cooling units to operate.
Specifically, the teaming of ORNL and Quantum Brilliance (QB) involves the building of a joint platform for collaborative development of quantum computing with high-performance computing (HPC) through the on-premises integration of QB's quantum computing cluster into HPC systems at ORNL.
Dr. Marcus Doherty, co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer at Quantum Brilliance, elaborated to Fierce Electronics via email, “QB’s parallel quantum computing system will be integrated into ORNL’s Advanced Computing Ecosystem Testbed (ACE). The ACE is a distinctive capability of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) that offers a centralized sandbox for deploying diverse computing and data resources. It enables the evaluation of various workloads across different system architectures, fostering the development of new HPC technologies relevant to OLCF and Department of Energy missions.”
While the main thrust of the collaboration is the integration of the ORNL ACE with the quantum computing acceleration infratsructure, the work also will involve connecting to the Frontier machine with more grand goals in mind.
“The ACE and QB’s technologies will be connected to the Frontier supercomputer via a HTTP interface that will support some joint workloads between the systems,” Doherty said. “However, the main effort is the integration into the ACE, which is an important testing ground before deeper integration into systems like Frontier in the future.”
Collaborating in this way will allow the partners to explore what is commonly called hybrid classical/quantum computing–the notion of both quantum and classical processors working together on a problem–but also parallel quantum computing, in which multiple quantum processors are working together to solve a problem.
“Parallel quantum computing holds transformative potential for scientific discovery and industrial applications that require high-performance computing,” said Dr. Travis Humble, Director, Quantum Science Center at ORNL. “Partnering with Quantum Brilliance allows us to explore effective integration with our existing HPC systems, paving the way for groundbreaking advancements that will inform the design of future HPC infrastructure.”
The team plans to co-develop new computational methods that exploit parallel and hybrid computing and new software tools that will enable users to implement those methods and develop their own. New knowledge of the hybrid computing systems is expected to enable ongoing co-design of superior computing systems, and the infrastructure tools and practical know-how to manage operations.
This is not ORNL's first quantum computing rodeo. The agency has done a great deal of research in quantum computing, and also has worked with quaantum firms like Rigetti Computing and Riverlane as it began to explore the intersection of classical supercomputing and quantum computing.