Topic Description

This workshop focuses on an emerging and impactful topic – Quantum Computing (QC), which is a rapidly-emerging technology that harnesses the laws of quantum mechanics to potentially solve problems too complex for classical high performance computing (HPC). In order to utilize QC to solve complex problems, in the past few years, both academia and industry have invested in QC, achieving tremendous growth worldwide in terms of quantum hardware, quantum software and application of QC in key use cases.

The integration of HPC and QC is a highly relevant topic of interest: for example, EU’s quantum flagship has pioneered the drafting of the EuroQCS: European Quantum Computing & Simulation Infrastructure whitepaper which specifically pointed out the importance of integrating quantum computers as part of the HPC infrastructure. In the private-public sector, IQM and LRZ also announced their technical whitepaper towards HPC-QC integration recently. Many important conferences, such as ISC22 and QCE22 have specific workshop sessions discussing the topic of HPC-QC integration. It is clear that the field is developing consensus in the near future for quantum computer systems as part of HPC centres, i.e., quantum computer-accelerated supercomputers. We would like to leverage this workshop in hope of addressing the following questions:

1. What is the right relationship between HPC and QC, or where exactly does quantum computing fit in classical high performance computing infrastructures?
2. How to build the classical/quantum hybrid computing system considering both hardware and software integration to realize potential advantage of the NISQ quantum computers? What will be the technical challenges in realizing such hybrid systems?
3. What quantum algorithms and applications can benefit from HPC and QC integration?
4. What will be Asia’s roadmap towards HPC+Q?
5. How may end users and stakeholders benefit from HPC+Q?

First, as advocated in EuroQCS infrastructure, quantum computers and simulators are positioned to be integrated into the HPC supercomputing infrastructure, where the relationship between HPC and QC is addressed. Important research questions include how and where exactly in the technical full stack the integration should be realized, how the design paradigm and design environment should be upgraded and repurposed to efficiently serve both the classical and quantum components of real-world problems.

Second, there are fundamentally different quantum technology/hardware and qubit realization that have been evolving, so as their full-stack software eco-system. With considerable diversity in the ever-changing, hardware-software coupled, hybrid HPC+Q systems, comes new challenges, such as how to organically organize the full stack software to decouple the hardware independent layers/libraries from the hardware dependent ones so as to achieve both generalizability of quantum solutions and hardware-specific optimization simultaneously. In addition, based on current NISQ QC specs and the extrapolated QC capacity growth, connectivity/latency improvement, etc. in the future, how should we rethink the overall HPC architecture, especially the compute/memory resource accessible to QC as well as the interconnect with QC so that potential performance bottlenecks could be resolved, and performance/efficiency maximized.

At last, various kinds of quantum algorithm and applications could potentially benefit from such a hybrid HPC+Q system including simulation, optimization, and machine learning which are wildly utilized in many key areas such as supply chain, finance, bioinformatics, etc.

The proposed HPC+Q workshop will offer a timely collection of information to benefit researchers and practitioners working in the broad research fields of HPC, quantum computing, and HPC-supported key application areas including simulation, optimization, and machine learning. All the aforementioned issues are well covered by the Topic of Interest in HPC Asia 2023. We feel confident that such a workshop will attract explosive submissions as well as enthusiastic audience.

Workshop Format and Schedule

The HPC+Q workshop will feature hall-day events on 27th Feb. 2023. We invite two keynote speakers and six invited speakers who are leading experts from both academia and industry. A list of keynote and invited speakers includes:

08:30-09:00	Keynote Talk 1 “The Hybrid Quantum - Supercomputer Platform Research at Riken” given by Prof Satoshi Matsuoka (Director, RIKEN Center for Computational Science)
09:00-09:30	Keynote Talk 2 “News on Quantum Computing” given by Prof José Ignacio Latorre (Director, Centre for Quantum Technologies)
09:30-10:00	Invited Talk “Accelerating HPC with a distributed quantum computer network” given by Dr Mikael Johansson (Quantum Strategist, CSC - IT Center for Science Ltd, Finland)
10:00-10:30	Invited Talk “Bridging the gap between high-performance classical and quantum computing” given by Eric Kievit (Chief Operating Officer (COO), Qblox)
10:30-11:00	Break
11:00-11:30	Invited Talk “Bringing Quantum Acceleration to HPC” given by Dr. Bruno Taketani (Doctor of Sciences (Physics), IQM Quantum Computers)
11:30-12:00	Invited Talk “GPU accelerated quantum computing at NVIDIA” given by Dr. Jin-Sung Kim (Developer Relations Manager, Quantum Computing, Nvidia)
12:00-12:30	Invited Talk “Qubit efficient quantum algorithms for quantum optimization and chemistry problems” given by Dimitris G. Angelakis (Assoc Professor, CQT NUS, TU Crete, and AngelQ)
12:30-13:00	Invited Talk “Multitasking for Quantum Annealing” given by Tian Huang (Research Scientist, IHPC, A*STAR)

Organizing Committee

Luo Tao (Chair), Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)
Yang Liwei, Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)
Huang Tian, Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)
Kong Jian Feng, Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)
Ye Jun, Institute of High Performance Computing (IHPC), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR)