Quantum computing: From the basic concepts to the embedding in an HPC environment for application purposes
Kristel F. L. Michielsen · JuSER (Forschungszentrum Jülich) · 2025
Quantum computing promises unprecedented possibilities for important computing tasks such as quantum simulations in chemistry and materials science or optimization and machine learning. With this potential, quantum computing is increasingly attracting interest from industry and scientific communities that use high performance computing (HPC) for their applications.Practical application requires the integration of quantum computers into existing HPC infrastructures in the form of quantum-classical hybrid computing models.The Jülich UNified Infrastructure for Quantum computing (JUNIQ), a manufacturer-independent quantum computing user facility established at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC) aims to address these needs.As an example, we present benchmarking results for the quantum approximate optimization algorithm (QAOA) emulated on a supercomputer and for the D-Wave quantum annealers for the tail assignment problem, a planning problem from aircraft industry.