NExt ApplicationS of Quantum Computing

Project Information

NEASQC

Grant agreement ID: 951821

DOI

10.3030/951821

Project closed

EC signature date 24 August 2020

Start date 1 September 2020

End date 30 November 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Future and Emerging Technologies (FET)

Total cost

€ 4 671 332,50

EU contribution

€ 4 671 332,50

Coordinated by

BULL SAS
France

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - NEASQC (NExt ApplicationS of Quantum Computing)

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2024-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

NEASQC aims at demonstrating 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 (Noise 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 a wide selection of NISQ-compatible industrial and financial use-cases, and will develop new quantum software techniques to solve those use-cases with a practical quantum advantage. To achieve this, the project brings together a multidisciplinary consortium of academic and industry experts in Quantum Computing, High Performance Computing, Artificial Intelligence, chemistry...

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.

NEASQC also ambitions to build a much-needed bridge between Quantum Computing hardware activities, particularly those of the Quantum Technologies 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.

NEASQC objectives
1. Develop 9 industrial and financial use cases with a practical quantum advantage for NISQ machines.
2. Develop open source NISQ programming libraries for industrial use cases, with a view to facilitate quantum computing experimentation for new users.
3. Build a strong user community dedicated to industrial NISQ applications.
4. Develop software stacks and benchmarks for the Quantum Technology Flagship hardware platforms.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The NEASQC project has achieved several key results in the field of quantum computing.

Firstly, it has developed a dedicated Programming framework that significantly enhance computational efficiency for industrial applications including a Benchmark Suite (TNBS) to evaluate quantum computer performance.

Secondly, the project has successfully demonstrated methods and tools for the exploration of quantum advantage in real-world scenarios, showcasing the potential of quantum technologies.

Thirdly, NEASQC has fostered a collaborative ecosystem, bringing together academic and industrial partners to accelerate quantum research to explore quantum algorithms for machine learning and optimization, showing promise in enhancing data processing and solving complex industrial problems.

Lastly, the project focused on Symbolic AI and graph algorithmics, enhancing natural language processing, probabilistic safety assessment, and rule-based systems using quantum computing techniques. This includes applications in NLP, safety assessments, and healthcare management.

These four results highlight the project's comprehensive approach to advancing quantum computing across various domains, as detailed in the following sections.

The NEASQC project identified a total of 31 exploitable results. At the end of the project, 26 of the 31 identified Exploitable Results have already been completed, 3 are still on-going, and only 2 will not be fully achieved.
Regarding the dissemination, the NEASQC project has provided : 40 publications, uploaded on the Zenodo repository besides the NEASQC website, 11 major events and 18 in total, 6 blog posts, 264 tweets and 235 LinkedIn posts.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The expected results and potential impacts are :

a- Impacts of the technology enablement activities

The technology enablement deliverables include:
• A complete quantum programming environment, with low layer support of the QT Flagship hardware platform – derived from the Eviden BULL freeware, myQLM
• A set of open source application software libraries derived after the use cases developments
• An application-focused hardware benchmark
We expect these deliverables to produce the following impacts:
• Boost the research in NISQ applications in Europe, as new industrial actors will find a complete and common toolset to start their practical investigation and share their results
• Build a steady bridge between the hardware activities and the end-users’ community. Even more than in classical IT, NISQ computing needs a strong cooperation between hardware makers and software users. So far it has been lacking in the QT Flagship, and we expect to successfully fill this gap. Thanks to our deliverables, hardware teams will have a framework to benchmark and optimize their platforms for the future users, as well as a compilation stack to offer to their early experimenters.

b- Impacts of the use case related activities
• Impact for the industrial members
The main motivation of our industrial members to participate to this call is that they are expecting tangible outcomes. The expected impacts are carefully documented in the corresponding work-packages, for each use case.
As a common denominator, the industrials are expecting to develop useful quantum advantage for their business, so that they will gain competitive advantages as soon as powerful enough NISQ platforms will be available. As such, IPR is carefully considered.
• Impact for the academic members
Quantum algorithmics has been developed so far in the scientific community. Not all discoveries have been examined from an application point of view. Conversely, not all applications candidate to quantum advantage have not been formalized to theoreticians. There is still a gap between the communities, as it occurred decades ago at the beginning of classical computer science. This project offers an unprecedented multidisciplinary collaboration framework between QC, HPC, AI, chemistry researchers, industry experts, off which brand-new research shall emerge.
• Impact for the whole community
We expect that our results and methodology will stimulate the academic and industrial communities. NEASQC members will spend most time and attention to the dissemination, in the various communities of QC end-users (in particular HPC, chemistry, optimization, ...) and academia. We also expect our work in use cases to provide strong directions for the development of NISQ machines, what would be very valuable the nascent quantum hardware industry.

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