Irish Centre for High-End Computing Joins Next Applications of Quantum Computing Project

October 5, 2020

Oct. 5, 2020 — The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) today announced that it is commencing work on a 4-year €4.67m EU Quantum Flagship project called NEASQC (NExt ApplicationS of Quantum Computing) along with 11 other European companies and research labs. This move formalises Ireland’s representation in the European Quantum Flagship Initiative a €1b EU flagship programme aimed at consolidating and expanding European scientific and commercial capability in Quantum Technologies.

As part of NEASQC, ICHEC will lead the work package to develop AI-related quantum computing use-cases. ICHEC will develop quantum natural language processing (QNLP) capabilities with Tilde Language Services (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia). ICHEC’s work on QNLP in NEASQC will carry forward and advance its previous work on the topic that was developed in collaboration with Intel Corporation in a 14-month-long project in 2019-2020. The objective of this research was to compare sentence meanings using a hybrid classical-quantum method for a chosen body of text to demonstrate similarity of the sentences based on distributional-compositional semantics. The results were published in the Institute of Physics Machine Learning: Science and Technology journal with the open-source QNLP software toolkit available to the community on GitHub.

ICHEC also works with Total Oil (France) and HQS Quantum Simulations (Germany) on quantum chemistry for efficient CO2 capture.

Commenting, Dr Venkatesh Kannan, Centre Technical Manager, ICHEC said: “It is of great significance for Ireland and ICHEC to actively work in the EU Quantum Flagship programme which develops cutting-edge quantum technologies and solutions. In particular, the NEASQC project is important for European and global quantum computing since it has been selected by the European Commission to develop quantum algorithms and software for solving problems and applications that are expected to demonstrate quantum advantage.”

Co-ordinated by Atos (Bull SAS), a leading European company with global activities in High Performance Computing and Quantum Computing, the NEASQC project will investigate a large selection of NISQ (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) compatible industrial and financial quantum computing applications and develop open-source software libraries to facilitate quantum computing experimentation for new users.

“The ultimate ambition of NEASQC is to encourage European user communities to investigate NISQ quantum computing. For this purpose, the project consortium will define and make available a complete and common toolset that new industrial actors can use to start their own practical investigation and share their results.” explained Cyril Allouche, Fellow VP, Head of the Atos Quantum R&D Program at Atos, and coordinator of the NEASQC project.

NEASQC is use-case driven, addressing practical problems such as drug discovery, CO2 capture, energy management, natural language processing, breast cancer detection, probabilistic risk assessment for energy infrastructures, or hydrocarbon well optimisation. NEASQC aims to initiate an active European community around NISQ Quantum Computing by providing a common toolset that will attract new industrial users.

The NEASQC project brings together academic experts and industrial end-users to investigate and develop a new breed of Quantum-enabled applications that can take advantage of NISQ systems in the near future. The NEASQC project is run by a European consortium that includes:

  • Atos, the European number one in High Performance Computing and initiator of the first quantum computing industry program in Europe (coordinator, France)
  • AstraZeneca AB, the global, science-led biopharmaceutical company (Sweden)
  • CESGA (Fundación Publica Gallega Centro Tecnológico de Supercomputación de Galicia), a major Spanish public HPC centre (Spain)
  • Electricité de France (EDF), the world’s leading electricity company and global leader in low-carbon energies (France)
  • HQS Quantum Simulations GmbH, an SME – spinoff of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology – that develops software for quantum mechanical material simulations (Germany)
  • HSBC Bank Plc, one of the world’s largest banking and financial services organisations (United Kingdom)
  • Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC), the national HPC centre in Ireland
  • Leiden University, through its Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science that owns a renowned expertise in quantum computing algorithmics, quantum machine learning and high-performance computing (Netherlands)
  • TILDE SIA, an SME that is a European leader in language technology (Latvia)
  • TOTAL S.E., the broad energy company (France)
  • Universidade da Coruña – CITIC (Centre for Information and Communications Technology Research), a unique research centre which promotes the advancement and excellence in R&D&I in the use of ICTs (Spain)
  • Université de Lorraine, through the LORIA lab (Lorraine Research Laboratory in Computer Science and its Applications, a research unit common to CNRS, Université de Lorraine and Inria) (France)

NEASQC is one of the projects selected within the second wave of EU Quantum Flagship projects. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 951821.

About ICHEC

ICHEC (Irish Centre for High-End Computing) delivers complex compute solutions to Irish HEAs, Enterprises and the Public Sector on behalf of the State. It is Ireland’s lead authority in High-Performance Computing (HPC) at national and international level, and manages the national HPC infrastructure, Kay.

ICHEC’s mission is to deliver on its national service mandate through achieving the following strategic objectives; ‘Excellence in Science’ by delivering to the national service mandate, ‘Advance Digital Skills’ in developing a highly-skilled workforce, ‘Accelerate Economic Development’ with a focus on the SME sector, and ‘Deliver HPC for Good’ to tackle some of the key societal challenges for Ireland.

ICHEC supports the third-level research community in breakthrough and transformative coding through its expertise in Code Optimisation, AI, Machine Learning, Data Science and Quantum Technologies. ICHEC enables researchers to bring new solutions to the complex scientific and social challenges of today, provides essential data analysis to public sector bodies and supports SMEs through optimising their data challenges.

Established by NUI Galway in 2005, ICHEC’s core funding is provided by the Departments of Business, Enterprise and Innovation (DBEI) and Department of Education and Skills (DES). ICHEC has supported over 2,000 research projects to-date many of which have been commercialised.

About NEASQC

The NEASQC project brings together academic experts and industrial end-users to investigate and develop a new breed of Quantum-enabled applications that can take advantage of NISQ (Noise Intermediate-Scale Quantum) systems in the near future. NEASQC is use-case driven, addressing practical problems such as drug discovery, CO2 capture, energy management, natural language processing, breast cancer detection, probabilistic risk assessment for energy infrastructures or hydrocarbon well optimisation. NEASQC aims to initiate an active European community around NISQ Quantum Computing by providing a common toolset that will attract new industrial users.


Source: The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC)

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