First-Ever Quantum for Science Day Brings HPC and QIS Together

On October 24, stakeholders from around the field of quantum information science (QIS) gathered virtually to discuss the state of the discipline at the first-ever Quantum for Science Day, hosted by the Quantum@NERSC team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).Quantum information science is a growing area of research and innovation at the Lab; this year, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) granted 250,000 GPU node hours to 16 QIS projects through the initiative.

At Quantum for Science Day, more than 100 unique participants from across academia, research labs, and industry logged on to learn and share information. The day kicked off with a panel discussion on quantum and HPC featuring experts from across the field, followed by talks from QIS@Perlmutter science teams hailing from Berkeley Lab, Rigetti, IBM, Xanadu, and Quantinuum. In the afternoon, NVIDIA offered hands-on tutorials on the basics of running quantum simulations on GPUs

Overall, said the organizers, the gathering was a success, and this first event certainly won’t be the last: “We were very excited about the number of people who participated and the high quality of the panel and talks,” said event co-organizer Katie Klymko. “We’re planning to make this an annual event and hope to see many exciting new developments from the QIS-in-HPC community next year as we will continue to support QIS researchers at NERSC in 2023.

For those hoping to revisit the knowledge base shared at Quantum for Science Day – or see what they missed – video recordings of all the day’s talks, tutorials, and panels are now available for use by the QIS-in-HPC community.