Shaping the future of quantum computing

Building on the success of last year’s inaugural Workshop on Broadly Accessible Quantum Computing presented at PEARC24, this year, NCSA’s Santiago Núñez-Corrales, a co-organizer,  and other original presenters were back, continuing the discussion with PEARC25 attendees. This year’s edition explored the latest advancements in quantum computing (QC) and its integration with high-performance computing and related applications. 

Open to participants from all backgrounds, the workshop aimed to “foster collaboration and knowledge sharing to advance QC adoption in the broader research computing community,” said Núñez-Corrales. While QC is in a fledgling stage now, workshop organizers say offering a program dedicated to discussing its practical applications, funding opportunities and hybrid quantum-classical strategies will help advance the state of quantum computing, bringing us closer to having real use cases.

Throughout the day, invited speakers and panelists interacted with about 60 audience members – an increase from last year – covering a range of topics including workforce development, policy considerations and strategies for making quantum resources more accessible. In one panel discussion, NCSA’s Deputy Director, John Towns, along with Arizona State University’s Torey Batelle, spoke first about the challenge of adoption with such a disruptive technology. “Previous technologies – vector processors, microprocessors (rise of the killer micros), clusters (growing out to the Beowulf efforts), GPUs (emerging from the gaming industry) – were disruptive, but quantum computing is even more so given the fundamentally different form of computing it embodies,” Towns said. “It is a highly disruptive technology, but to ensure adoption, it must be introduced in as non-disruptive a way as possible. The technology is at a point that very early adopters are critical to guiding further development.” 

Asked by moderators Núñez-Corrales and Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center’s Bruno Abreu how industry should look at what HPC centers bring to the table in terms of quantum computing, Batelle pointed to expertise in workforce development and community building. Towns added that HPC centers are used to interfacing with the research community, and some, such as NCSA, already partner with industry. “We’re a conduit to growing the community they want, and we should take advantage of that,” he said. 

To advance QC, these panelists cautioned that we’re still trying to define quantum advantage. “The way we think about computing is fundamentally different than how we’ll need to think about quantum and that could be the first real challenge,” Towns said. To help identify use cases, the HPC community needs to create an environment within which researchers are free to explore. And while defining quantum advantage is still on the horizon, presenters and participants alike were bullish on the future of quantum computing’s potential.

“Watch this space,” Towns said. “Cool things are going to happen.”

ABOUT NCSA
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provides supercomputing, expertise and advanced digital resources for the nation’s science enterprise. At NCSA, University of Illinois faculty, staff, students and collaborators from around the globe use innovative resources to address research challenges for the benefit of science and society. NCSA has been assisting many of the world’s industry giants for over 35 years by bringing industry, researchers and students together to solve grand challenges at rapid speed and scale.