EU Computing Project begins to Build

A collaboration of 10 international partners from academia and industry are pursuing a research project to build a high-performance quantum computer which will be available to a broad community of users. OpenSuperQ, coordinated by Saarland University in Germany, is part of the EU’s unprecedented €1 billion Flagship initiative on Quantum Technology.

In order to catalyse the transfer of quantum computing research from the lab to the market, the collaborative project has adopted an open approach to serve a large community of early adopters and educate the next generation of quantum scientists, developers and users.

Jonas Bylander, Associate Professor at the Quantum Technology Laboratory at Chalmers University of Technology and one of the principal investigators in OpenSuperQ said: “Building a quantum computer with 100 qubits is a very ambitious and difficult task. By joining forces in Europe and contributing with our respective expertise, the task will be easier to solve.”

The expertise of Chalmers lies mainly in the smallest building blocks of a quantum computer, the superconducting qubits. Over the years, the University has made many contributions to developing the field, coordinated several EU projects through Professor Göran Wendin and is leading the Wallenberg Centre for Quantum Technology, the major Swedish effort of engineering a quantum computer.

“We are fortunate to have gathered a team of the most renowned players in the field bringing together science, engineering and application development at the highest level,” says Professor Frank Wilhelm-Mauch from the Physics Department of Saarland University who coordinates the project.

The OpenSuperQ system will be located at the supercomputer centre at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany. The hardware will be based on superconducting integrated circuits and contain the necessary technological infrastructure, including a control system and cryogenics. The software stack will be integrated, from user access all the way to low-level control.

While designed as an all-purpose quantum computer, the project will be particularly targeting applications for quantum simulation in chemistry and materials science as well as for optimisation and machine learning. The computer will be among the leading platforms in the world and the first of its kind developed in Europe.

OpenSuperQ receives funding from the current EU Research Framework Programme Horizon 2020 and will run for an initial period of three years.

For more information, please visit opensuperq.eu