Date: March 15, 2023 | 4 p.m. (UTC)

Speaker: Alba Cervera Lierta, Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Quantum Computers are computational devices composed by a hardware piece that follows the laws of quantum mechanics, other equipment (electronics, cryogenics, photonics, …) that controls the quantum hardware and a software stack that connects all pieces and allows us to program and utilize the quantum chip. The quantum processing units (QPU) that are at the core of quantum computers are treated as computational accelerators suitable to tackle particular problems out of range for standard HPC systems. However, current QPU are still prototypes prone to errors. As technology improves, several algorithmic proposals emerge that combine traditional HPC requirements with quantum computation. For that to happen, we need to properly integrate the QPUs into the HPC infrastructures. In this talk, I will address the state of the art in quantum-HPC integration and review the basic requirements, challenges and opportunities of this hybrid computational approach.

About the speaker:

Alba Cervera-Lierta is a Senior Researcher at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. She earned her PhD in 2019 at the University of Barcelona, where she studied her physics degree and a Msc in particle physics. After her PhD, she moved to the University of Toronto as a postdoctoral fellow at the Alán Aspuru-Guizik group. She works on near-term quantum algorithms and their applications, high-dimensional quantum computation, and artificial intelligence strategies in quantum physics. Since October of 2021, she is the coordinator of the Quantum Spain project, an initiative to boost the quantum computing ecosystem that will acquire and operate a quantum computer at the BSC-CNS. She is also the quantum technical coordinator of EuroQCS-Spain project, one of the six selected projects from EuroHPC-JU to host a European Quantum computer and integrate it into the supercomputing infrastructure.

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