Universities Space Research Association to Lead a DARPA Project on Quantum Computing

(HPCWire) Universities Space Research Association (USRA) announced that DARPA has awarded the organization and its partners Rigetti Computing and the NASA Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL) to work as a team to advance the state of art in quantum optimization. USRA, as the prime contractor of the award, will manage the collaboration.
The collaboration will focus on developing a superconducting quantum processor, hardware -aware software and custom algorithms that take direct advantage of the hardware advances to solve scheduling and asset allocation problems. In addition, the team will design methods for benchmarking the hardware against classical computers to determine quantum advantage.
USRA Senior Vice President Bernie Seery noted, “This is a very exciting public-private partnership for the development of forefront quantum computing technology and the algorithms that will be used to address pressing, strategically significant challenges. We are delighted to receive this award and look forward to working with our partner institutions to deliver value to DARPA.”