Classical computers today hit limitations in particular in relation with the slow-down of Moore’s law and with their increasing energy consumption.
On the other hand, the need for high performance computing increases continuously, pulled among others by activities in relation with optimization, energy savings and fighting against climate change.
Quantum Computing is recognized as a mean to bridge this gap, by providing calculation resources which will by far exceed those of classical computers.
Using the fundamentals of Physics Science, Quantum Computers have the potential to revolutionise a broad range of application areas, such as energy, transportation, design of molecules (for chemical, bio-technology, material science of carbon capture applications…), manufacturing and scheduling, artificial intelligence in general…
Besides their huge potential ability to solve problems which are in some cases intractable for classical computers, Quantum Processors comparably operate with a very small energy consumptions (typically less than 10kW) – while the power consumption of High Performance Computing centres is typically in the range of megawatts.
PASQAL builds upon a technology developed for decades now by a research group from Institut d’Optique in Palaiseau (France). Using neutral atoms trapped in a vacuum chamber and manipulated by lasers, this technology presents unique advantages in terms of ability to address a wide range of applicative cases, of scalability and of flexibility and connectivity. It operates at ambient temperature, thus avoiding the use of dedicated high-performance refrigerators needed for many other Quantum Processing technologies and which degrade their reliability and energy consumption.
The technology has now reached a maturity level where it is ready for being industrialized.
The overall objective of the project was therefore to develop and industrialized version of the QPU (Quantum Processing Unit) which will be supplied directly to PASQAL’s clients or made available to them through a cloud platform.
We successfully achieved our objectives: two QPUs, the QaaS development (cloud and full software stack) and the first real world use-case in Financial Services.
