HPCQS and EuroQCS: engaging and supporting communities to make the most out of HPC-QCS environments

In partnership with CEA and Inria, GENCI was awarded two missions within HQI (France Hybrid HPC Quantum Initiative), launched in January 2022: the procurement of quantum computing systems, and the dissemination and end-user community support. As part of these missions, GENCI and CEA are collaborating with their European partners to engage and support communities to unlock the potential of hybrid HPC-QCS infrastructures. The European project HPCQS (HPC Quantum Simulator hybrid) enabled GENCI and FZJ to acquire twin devices from the French start-up Pasqal. They will be installed at TGCC and JSC by the end of 2023. On top of both systems, partners are collaborating on a broad research program oriented towards integrating these two systems respectively with the Joliot Curie (GENCI-CEA) and JUWELS (FZJ-JSC) supercomputers and solving hybrid HPC-QS use cases. The EuroQCS-France consortium was selected in October 2022 by EuroHPC Joint Undertaking to host a photonic quantum computer that will also be coupled with Joliot Curie early in 2024. These first devices will complement a hybrid HPC-QCS environment, whose first building blocks – emulators like the Atos QLM, Pulser (Pasqal) and Perceval (Quandela) – are available since the beginning of 2023. While acquiring and exposing a diversity of platforms is necessary, making sure they attract users is critical to the success of these initiatives. This will be partly handled through the creation of a High-Level Support Team (HLST). Various models of co-funding initiatives called “Pack Quantique” will be initiated to federate startups and academic laboratories to investigate use cases provided by industrial players. This model will be extended at national level to include a broader variety of organizations. It could also be replicated at European scale. A network of “Houses of Quantum” is foreseen to host local ecosystem and enhance collaborations through the organization of hackathons and dissemination events.