12 European Companies and Research Labs Join Forces to Boost Industrial Quantum Computing Applications

(HPCWire) The NExt ApplicationS of Quantum Computing (NEASQC) project brings together a multidisciplinary consortium of academic and industry experts in Quantum Computing, High Performance Computing, Artificial Intelligence, chemistry and energy management. NEASQC aims to demonstrate that, though the millions of qubits that will guarantee fully fault-tolerant quantum computing are still far away, there are practical use cases for the NISQ (Noisy Intermediate- Scale Quantum) devices that will be available in the near future. NISQ computing can deliver significant advantages when running certain applications, thus bringing game-changing benefits to users, and particularly industrial users.
The NEASQC consortium has chosen 9 NISQ-compatible industrial and financial use-cases, and will develop new quantum software techniques to solve those use-cases with a practical quantum advantage.
“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 also aims to build a much-needed bridge between Quantum Computing hardware activities, particularly those of the European Quantum Flagship, and the end-user community. Even more than in classical IT, NISQ computing demands a strong cooperation between hardware teams and software users. We expect our work in use cases will provide strong directions for the development of NISQ machines, what will be very valuable to the nascent quantum hardware industry.