Sept. 26, 2024 — The procurement contract of the LUMI-Q consortium’s quantum computer, the EuroHPC quantum computer to be located in Czechia, has been signed by the EuroHPC JU and the selected Finland-based vendor IQM Quantum Computers.

The LUMI-Q’s consortium quantum computer is based on superconducting qubits in a star-shaped topology. Such a star-shaped topology minimises the number of swap operations between qubits thus enabling the execution of very complex quantum algorithms.

The system will offer 24 physical qubits coupled to a central resonator.

LUMI-Q will be available to a wide range of European users, from the scientific community to industry and the public sector. The upcoming quantum computing infrastructure will support the development of a wide range of applications with industrial, scientific and societal relevance for Europe, adding new capabilities to the European supercomputing infrastructure.

The LUMI-Q consortium system will enable European end-users to actively explore applications and algorithms tailored for the novel star topology, such as e.g. hardware-efficient quantum error correction (QEC) schemes.

Owned by the European High-Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), the LUMI-Q consortium quantum system will be connected to the EuroHPC petascale supercomputer Karolina and hosted by IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center in Ostrava.

LUMI-Q is co-funded with a total acquisition cost of EUR 5 million. The EuroHPC JU will fund 50% of the  costs and the remaining 50% will be funded by the LUMI-Q consortium. The LUMI-Q consortium is a true pan-European collaboration effort with 9 European countries involved: Czechia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Norway, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The installation of the system will start in 2025.

IQM has been selected following a call for tender launched in February 2024.  On June 2023, the EuroHPC JU signed hosting agreements with six sites across Europe to host and operate EuroHPC quantum computers. On July 2024, the EuroHPC JU has announced the signature of the procurement contract for the first quantum system, EuroQCS-Poland, with the selected vendor.

The selection of six hosting entities followed the view of offering the widest possible variety of different European quantum computing platforms and hybrid classical-quantum architectures, giving Europe the opportunity to be at the forefront of this emerging field, and to provide European users with access to diverse and complementary quantum technologies.

This initiative offers a novel interpretation of quantum computers as accelerator platforms in genuine HPC environments. The foreseen integration will require essential R&D developments towards a hybrid software stack managing both HPC and quantum computing (QC) workloads. During the integration work, all Hosting Entities will collaborate closely with European standardization bodies.

These six quantum computers will come on top of two analogue quantum simulators procured under the EuroHPC JU project HPCQS and which are based on neutral atoms, supplied by the French company PASQAL. HPCQS aims to develop and coordinate a cloud-based European federated infrastructure, tightly integrating two quantum computers, each controlling 100-plus qubits in the Tier-0 HPC systems Joliot-Curie of GENCI and the JUWELS modular supercomputer at the Julich Supercomputing Centre (JSC).

About EuroHPC JU

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) is a legal and funding entity created in 2018 to enable the European Union and EuroHPC participating countries to coordinate their efforts and pool their resources with the objective of making Europe a world leader in supercomputing. In order to equip Europe with a world-leading supercomputing infrastructure, the EuroHPC JU has already procured nine supercomputers, located across Europe. Three of these EuroHPC supercomputers are now ranked among the world’s top 10 most powerful supercomputers: LUMI in Finland, Leonardo in Italy and MareNostrum 5 in Spain.  No matter where in Europe they are located, European scientists and users from the public sector and industry can benefit from these EuroHPC supercomputers via the EuroHPC Access Calls to advance science and support the development of a wide range of applications with industrial, scientific and societal relevance for Europe.

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Source: EuroHPC JU