Quantum Scientific Computing

Vincenzo De Maio, Dominik Bork, Ivona Brandić

Scientific workflows constitute a pivotal resource for the scientific computing community, as they provide a standard interface to define, execute, and analyze the results of scientific computations. The advent of the Post-Moore era exposes the scientific computing research community with the challenge of scaling HPC facilities, to address the demands of modern scientific applications. While quantum computing, on the one hand, promises noteworthy theoretical speedups for different scientific applications, executing a whole scientific workflow on quantum hardware is infeasible since not all computations can achieve a speedup on quantum hardware. As a consequence, computational scientists defined the concept of a hybrid quantum-classical workflow, which is capable of exploiting the capabilities of quantum and classical hardware. Since the adaptation of classical scientific workflows to the new hybrid quantum-classical scenario can be challenging for scientists, we propose RIGOLETTO, a workflow definition language allowing scientists to define where to execute each task on a hybrid quantum-classical system. As a proof-of-concept, we report on two scientific workflows and identify open challenges in the definition of hybrid quantum-classical workflows.

Susan Clark, Daniel Lobser, Melissa Revelle +13 more

The Quantum Scientific Computing Open User Testbed (QSCOUT) at Sandia National Laboratories is a trapped-ion qubit system designed to evaluate the potential of near-term quantum hardware in scientific computing applications for the U.S. Department of Energy and its Advanced Scientific Computing Research program. Similar to commercially available platforms, it offers quantum hardware that researchers can use to perform quantum algorithms, investigate noise properties unique to quantum systems, and test novel ideas that will be useful for larger and more powerful systems in the future. However, unlike most other quantum computing testbeds, the QSCOUT allows both quantum circuit and low-level pulse control access to study new modes of programming and optimization. The purpose of this article is to provide users and the general community with details of the QSCOUT hardware and its interface, enabling them to take maximum advantage of its capabilities.

Raymond Laflamme, Emanuel H. Knill

Qiping Wei, Fengxiang Zhang

This paper studies the significant scientific ideas presented in quantum computers and quantum communications. In quantum computers, a quantum has no precise position. It does not follow the causal law and does not hold repeatability. Quantum addition takes almost no time. A quantum (qubit) can present both “1” and “0” at the same time. In quantum communications, when two particles are entangled, one can transfer information to the other that can even across cosmic distance away without energy, time, and any ”field” as medium. All these ideas together form a set of completely new ideas of “rational science”, breaking through the concepts of classical science. However, the slow research progress of quantum computers and quantum communications reflects that people's knowledge of scientific ideas is very limited. This paper is to discuss the evolution of scientific ideas inspired by quantum computers and quantum communications for further mining the scientific research ideas.