Supercomputing SC25

This year at Supercomputing I will have two main talks. I’ll have an intervention at the 1st Annual Workshop on Large Scale Quantum-Classical Computing, on the IBM-Pasqal collaboration with more details to come. And another talk on “Towards a user-centric HPC-QC environment” at the 1st International Workshop on Software Frameworks and Workload Management for Quantum and HPC Ecosystems.

Here the topic will be on our vision and progress on the user execution environment for hybrid jobs. Crucially, I will argue of the need to improve the ability to execute and test programs and workflows in multiple environments. Currently I see many bugs appear as end-users move from local development, to HPC powered emulation and real QPU jobs, slowing down progress and preventing the scarce QPU resources of being used optimally.

I will also discuss our upcoming scheduling design, and overall HPC-QC integration architecture.

The abstract is: Robust execution environments for quantum computing can aid the industry with key challenges like application development, portability, and reproducibility, and help unlock the development of more modular quantum program, driving forward hybrid quantum workflows. In this work, we show progress towards a basic, but portable, runtime environment for developing and executing hybrid quantum-classical programs running in High Performance Computing (HPC) environments enhanced with Quantum Processing Units (QPUs). The middleware includes a second layer of scheduling after the main HPC resource manager in order to improve the utilization of the QPU, and extra functionality for observability, monitoring, and admin access. We show how this allows us to manage several programming Software Development Kits (SDKs) as first-class citizens in the environment by building on a recently proposed vendor-neutral Quantum Resource Management Interface (QRMI). Lastly, we discuss and show a solution for the monitoring and observability stack, completing our description of the hybrid system architecture.

The accompanying paper will appear in the SC25 proceedings, and on the ArXiV.