Pacific Northwest Laboratory and Microsoft Team Up to Advance Quantum Computing

(GeekWire) From cryptography to supply-chain optimization to advances in solid-state physics, the coming era of quantum computers could bring about enormous changes, assuming its potential can be fully realized.
Yet many hurdles still need to be overcome before all of this can happen. This one of the reasons the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Microsoft have teamed up to advance this nascent field.
The developer of the Q# programming language, Microsoft Quantum recently announced the creation of an intermediate bridge that will allow Q# and other languages to be used to send instructions to different quantum hardware platforms. This includes the simulations being performed on PNNL’s own powerful supercomputers, which are used to test the quantum algorithms that could one day run on those platforms. While scalable quantum computing is still years away, these simulations make it possible to design and test many of the approaches that will eventually be used.
“We have extensive experience in terms of parallel programming for supercomputers,” said PNNL computer scientist Sriram Krishnamoorthy. “The question was, how do you use these classical supercomputers to understand how a quantum algorithm and quantum architectures would behave while we build these systems?”