The Galician Supercomputing Center (CESGA) – located in northwestern Spain – has announced that it will acquire a quantum computer, valued at €14 million (~$15 million USD), from Fujitsu. CESGA says that the system is expected to be installed this year.
The system will include four main elements: a “flexible” quantum computer; a high-performance computer; a quantum algorithm emulator; and a storage system to capture the resulting data from the aforementioned components. It is being jointly funded by the Galician Innovation Agency of the Xunta de Galicia (the governing body of Galicia) and the European Union – not via EuroHPC, but rather via the REACT-EU program, which “supports investment projects that foster crisis-repair capacities and contribute to a green, digital and resilient recovery of the economy” in the wake of Covid-19.
CESGA most recently updated its traditional HPC power last year with the launch of FinisTerrae III, an Atos-built, Intel- and Nvidia-powered system that delivers around 4.4 peak petaflops. But the center has been very active in the quantum space: last summer, CESGA created the Galician Quantum Technologies Pole, which – starting with €30 million in funding – aims to establish Galicia as a “European and international benchmark in quantum computing and communication by 2030,” both in terms of academia and research and in terms of business.
But even before the Quantum Technologies Pole, Atos delivered a Quantum Learning Machine (QLM) – which the company touts as “the world’s highest-performing commercially available quantum simulator” – to CESGA, which installed the QLM in FinisTerrae III. CESGA also notes that it participates in the Quantum Spain project, which is coordinating institutions to “create the first quantum computing infrastructure in Spain,” and the Complementary Plan for Quantum Communications, a collaboration between the Spanish government and various autonomous communities (like Galicia) to develop quantum communications infrastructure.
The acquisition of the Fujitsu hardware, then, represents yet another ratcheting-up of CESGA’s investment in the quantum space. No details yet on the specifics of that hardware, but it would be easy to draw a line between this announcement and the news from August of last year that Fujitsu had teamed up with Riken to begin selling quantum computers in 2023. Per reporting from that time, Fujitsu intends to sell a 64-qubit quantum computer starting this year, offering it to customers working on pharmaceutical, material and financial research.
Elsewhere in the European Union, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking recently selected six sites across the EU to host diverse quantum technologies and architectures. Read more about that here.