CINECA plans to publish in the next months a Call for Proposals for the allocation of quantum computational resources with the aim of supporting Italian Quantum Computing research. For the selection will be used the ISCRA project (the Italian SuperComputing Resource Allocation),
CINECA will offer access to two kinds of quantum devices: a Quantum Annealer and a Quantum Simulator. Moreover, Cineca will give the possibility to use libraries for the development of quantum algorithms and classical emulators of quantum systems installed on Cineca’s HPC computing systems (Marconi100, Leonardo).
With regard to Quantum Annealing, computing hours will be distributed on:
- Advantage, the latest annealer model built by the Canadian company D-Wave, with 5000+ qubits and average degree for each qubit equal to 15. In addition, computational resources will also be available for their hybrid solvers (D-wave Hybrid and Discrete Quantum Model ).
Starting from March 2021, it will be possible to submit an application to access the D-Wave computational services by completing an ISCRA-C project. We remind you that ISCRA-C calls are scheduled on a monthly basis, with deadlines on the 15th of each month. Consequently, the first deadline to request D-Wave hours is March 15, 2021.
For more information on our resources
For more information on D-Wave
For the Quantum Simulator the following system will be accessible:
- Fresnel, the 100 qubits quantum computer with neutral atoms made by the French company Pasqal, capable of running the latest generation hybrid variational algorithms such as QAOA. Fresnel is not yet ready for production: Pasqal experts foresee its first activation in September 2021. For this highly experimental type, one or two scientifically relevant projects will be selected in order to test the new quantum machines. Project selections will take place through the ISCRA portal and must be received by March 15th 2021, in order to be able to develop, with the technical support of the manufacturer, the algorithms that will then be tested on the actual machine.
The offer is completed by the possibility of using libraries for the development of quantum algorithms and classical emulators of quantum systems installed on Cineca’s HPC computing systems (Marconi100, Leonardo).
Some examples of software selected for installation are:
- Qiskit, open-source python library by IBM for developing quantum algorithms. Qiskit supports CPU and GPU emulation methods and additional configurable options.
- Cirq, open-source python library by Google for the development of quantum algorithms.
- QuTip, open-source python library for circuit emulation and resolution of open quantum systems.
- TensorFlow Quantum: open-source python library for Quantum Machine Learning, developed by Google.
- Pennylane: open-source python library for Quantum Machine Learning, developed by Xanadu.
- QuEST, emulator of quantum circuits and density matrices. Multithreaded, distributed and GPU accelerated, QuEST is an open-source C / C ++ library.
Technical report