[Image: Quantum Brilliance]
In early September, the deep-tech startup Quantum Brilliance, based in Australia and Germany, announced a strategic collaboration with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), USA. The goal of the alliance is to “enhance the synergy between quantum and classical computing” by building a joint platform to combine quantum-computing hardware with high-performance-computing (HPC) infrastructure, according to a press release.
Specifically, the partners plan to explore the on-premises integration of Quantum Brilliance’s diamond-based quantum computing cluster into classical HPC systems deployed at ORNL’s facilities in Tennessee. “Partnering with Quantum Brilliance allows us to explore effective integration with our existing HPC systems, paving the way for groundbreaking advancements that will inform the design of future HPC infrastructure,” Travis Humble, the director of ORNL’s Quantum Science Center, said in the release
Diamonds give quantum spin
Quantum Brilliance was founded in 2019 out of research at the Australian National University, Australia, and it receives funding from the Australian Central Government. The company has developed “quantum accelerators” that can operate at room temperature, thanks to its choice of qubits—nuclear spin in diamond nitrogen–vacancy (NV) centers.
NV centers are point defects in a diamond crystal lattice, consisting of a nearest-neighbor pair of a nitrogen atom, which substitutes for a carbon atom, and a lattice vacancy. The nuclear spins around the NV centers can be initialized and read out optically, via interactions with the electron spin of the NV center. The resulting qubits are robust to environmental influences and don’t need cryogenic cooling or complex laser setups.
The firm hopes to leverage the ambient operation of the diamond-based hardware to integrate the accelerators into edge-computing devices and existing supercomputing centers (see “Taking Quantum Computing to the Edge”)—and the ORNL collaboration appears to be a step toward that goal.
Hybrid and parallel approaches
Quantum Brilliance and ORNL aim to use the integration of a cluster of the company’s room-temperature quantum accelerators into ORNL’s HPC systems to explore “the performance and effectiveness of parallelized and hybridized quantum computing.” The company press release explains that parallel quantum computing refers to multiple quantum processors working together to solve a problem, while hybrid quantum computing refers to both quantum and classical processors working in combination.
The team plans to develop computation methods that exploit both parallelized and hybridized quantum computing, as well as software tools to allow users to implement them.
The team plans to develop computation methods that exploit both types of computing, as well as software tools to allow users to implement them. Quantum Brilliance expects that new knowledge obtained from the hybrid computing systems will enable improved co-design of future systems, as well as the development of infrastructure tools and “practical know-how” to manage operations.
The announcement comes on the heels of a separate announcement from ORNL of a study, published in Future Generation Computing Systems, on integrating quantum computing with supercomputing systems. The paper describes a potential framework for boosting traditional scientific HPC by leveraging the quantum approach.
“This collaboration represents a significant milestone in our mission to bring quantum computing to practical applications,” said Mark Luo, CEO of Quantum Brilliance. “By integrating the world’s first cluster of room-temperature QPUs with ORNL's leading HPC infrastructure, we aim to demonstrate the benefits of parallel quantum computing. This is a critical milestone towards achieving massively parallelized quantum accelerators, which we believe will be the preferred architecture in HPC centers.”