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Nvidia announced today it will accelerate quantum computing efforts at national supercomputing centers around the world with the open-source Nvidia CUDA-Q platform.
Supercomputing sites in Germany, Japan and Poland will use the platform to power the quantum processing units (QPUs) inside their Nvidia-accelerated high-performance computing systems. Nvidia also announced that nine new supercomputers worldwide are using Nvidia Grace Hopper Superchips to speed scientific research and discovery. Combined, the systems deliver 200 exaflops, or 200 quintillion calculations per second, of energy-efficient AI processing power.
QPUs are the brains of quantum computers that use the behavior of particles like electrons or photons to calculate differently than traditional processors, with the potential to make certain types of calculations faster.
Germany’s Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) at Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ) is installing a QPU built by IQM Quantum Computers as a complement to its Jupiter supercomputer, powered by the Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip.
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The ABCI-Q supercomputer, located at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) in Japan, is designed to advance the nation’s quantum computing initiative. Powered by the Nvidia Hopper architecture, the system will add a QPU from QuEra.
Poland’s Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) has recently installed two photonic QPUs, built by ORCA Computing, connected to a new supercomputer partition accelerated by Nvidia Hopper.
“Useful quantum computing will be enabled by the tight integration of quantum with GPU supercomputing,” said Tim Costa, director of quantum and HPC at Nvidia, in a statement. “Nvidia’s quantum computing platform equips pioneers such as AIST, JSC and PSNC to push the boundaries of scientific discovery and advance the state of the art in quantum-integrated supercomputing.”
The QPU integrated with ABCI-Q will enable researchers at AIST to investigate quantum applications in AI, energy and biology, utilizing Rubidium atoms controlled by laser light as qubits to perform calculations. These are the same type of atoms used in precision atomic clocks. Each atom is identical, providing a promising method of achieving a large-scale, high-fidelity quantum processor.
“Japan’s researchers will make progress toward practical quantum computing applications with the ABCI-Q quantum-classical accelerated supercomputer,” said Masahiro Horibe, deputy director of G-QuAT/AIST, in a statement. “Nvidia is helping these pioneers push the boundaries of quantum computing research.”
PSNC’s QPUs will enable researchers to explore biology, chemistry and machine learning with two PT-1 quantum photonics systems. The systems use single photons, or packets of light, at telecom frequencies as qubits. This allows for a distributed, scalable and modular quantum architecture using standard, off-the-shelf telecom components.
“Our collaboration with ORCA and Nvidia has allowed us to create a unique environment and build a new quantum-classical hybrid system at PSNC,” said Krzysztof Kurowski, CTO and deputy director of PSNC, in a statement. “The open, easy integration and programming of multiple QPUs and GPUs efficiently managed by user-centric services is critical for developers and users. This close collaboration paves the way for a new generation of quantum-accelerated supercomputers for many innovative application areas, not tomorrow, but today.”
The QPU integrated with Jupiter will enable JSC researchers to develop quantum applications for chemical simulations and optimization problems as well as demonstrate how classical supercomputers can be accelerated by quantum computers. It is built with superconducting qubits, or electronic resonant circuits,
that can be manufactured to behave as artificial atoms at low temperatures.
“Quantum computing is being brought closer by hybrid quantum-classical accelerated supercomputing,” said Kristel Michielsen, head of the quantum information processing group at JSC, in a statement. “Through our ongoing collaboration with Nvidia, JSC’s researchers will advance the fields of quantum computing as well as chemistry and material science.”
CUDA-Q is an open-source and QPU-agnostic quantum-classical accelerated supercomputing platform. It is used by the majority of the companies deploying QPUs and delivers best-in-class performance.
Nvidia’s Grace Hopper Superchip attacks climate change
Regarding the Nvidia Grace Hopper Superchips in the nine supercomputing centers, Nvidia said the move will speed scientific research and discovery.
New Grace Hopper-based supercomputers coming online include EXA1-HE, in France, from CEA and Eviden; Helios at Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet, in Poland, and Alps at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre from Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE); Jupiter at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Germany; DeltaAI at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; and Miyabi at Japan’s Joint Center for Advanced High Performance Computing — established between the Center for Computational Sciences at the University of Tsukuba and the Information Technology Center at the University of Tokyo.
CEA, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, and Eviden, an Atos Group company, in April announced the delivery of the EXA1-HE supercomputer, based on Eviden’s BullSequana XH3000 technology. The BullSequana XH3000 architecture offers a new, patented warm-water cooling
system, while the EXA1-HE is equipped with 477 compute nodes based on Grace Hopper.
“AI is accelerating research into climate change, speeding drug discovery and leading to breakthroughs in dozens of other fields,” said Ian Buck, vice president of hyperscale and HPC at Nvidia, in a statement. “Nvidia Grace Hopper-powered systems are becoming an essential part of HPC for their ability to transform industries while driving better energy efficiency.”
In addition, Isambard-AI and Isambard 3 from the University of Bristol in the U.K. and systems at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Texas Advanced Computing Center in the U.S. join a growing wave of Nvidia Arm-based supercomputers using Grace CPU Superchips and the Grace Hopper platform.
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Bringing together the Arm-based Nvidia Grace CPU and Hopper GPU architectures using Nvidia NVLink-C2C interconnect technology, GH200 serves as the engine behind scientific supercomputing centers across the globe. Many centers are planning to go from system installation to real science in months
instead of years.
Isambard-AI phase one consists of a HPE Cray Supercomputing EX2500 with 168 Nvidia GH200 Superchips, making it one of the most efficient supercomputers ever built. When the remaining 5,280 Nvidia Grace Hopper Superchips arrive at the University of Bristol’s National Composites Centre this summer, it will increase performance by about 32 times.
“Isambard-AI positions the U.K. as a global leader in AI, and will help foster open science innovation both domestically and internationally,” said Simon McIntosh-Smith, professor at the University of Bristol, in a statement. “Working with Nvidia, we delivered phase one of the project in record time, and when completed this summer will see a massive jump in performance to advance data analytics, drug discovery, climate research and many more areas.”
