The company Qubit Pharmaceuticals and Sorbonne University announce a scientific breakthrough, with a simulation of quantum calculations with more than 40 exact qubits on classical computers.
The Qubit Pharmaceuticals emulator is called Hyperion-1. It was developed in partnership with Sorbonne University.
“This is indeed an exact simulation of 40 logical qubits carried out with very high velocity, which is an unprecedented feat in the application of quantum calculations, particularly to quantum chemistry,” comments Jean-Philip Piquemal, director of the Laboratory. in Theoretical Chemistry (Sorbonne University/CNRS) and scientific director of Qubit Pharmaceuticals.
Hyperion-1 uses high performance computing
Hyperion-1 uses high-performance computing to carry out this simulation. This performance was achieved on the Jean Zay HPC/AI converged supercomputer on 16 computing nodes (128 GPUs1 A100 NVIDIA), on which the Hyperion-1 emulator was developed.
The company insists on the fact that this quantum calculation “was obtained without approximation and with a level of maximum fidelity, that is to say without error, or without noise, according to the expression in force in quantum physics. Other consideration to take into account, the calculation time was “very short, close to what one would expect from a real quantum computer”.
“Hyperion-1 makes it possible to simulate quantum states while benefiting from the stability of classical computers, thus avoiding the errors inherent in the quantum computers available today” indicates Jean-Philip Piquemal.
Waiting for quantum computers
Until powerful quantum computers come into production, it is HPC simulation that is driving software development efforts in quantum computing.
In March 2023, OVHcloud acquired its first quantum machine, MosaiQ designed by the French start-up Quandela. The computing power of this computer is… 2 qubits.
At the end of November, Scaleway, the cloud subsidiary of the iliad group, formed a partnership with Quelle. Scaleway will offer, through this partnership, a Quantum Computing as a Service (QCaaS) offering.
Numerous simulation initiatives
In 2017, Microsoft announced a development kit for its programming language, named Q#, dedicated to quantum computing, and a simulator on its Azure cloud computing platform, capable of simulating more than 40 qubits of quantum calculations.
IBM announced the same year that it had succeeded in manufacturing a 50-qubit quantum processor capable of resisting decoherence for 90 microseconds.
In 2021, the American company Rigetti unveiled an 80-qubit quantum computer composed of two 40-qubit computers. The system is named Aspen-M.
In 2022, Fujitsu claimed to have developed the world’s fastest quantum simulator, capable of running 36-qubit quantum circuits on a cluster system including the company’s PRIMEHPC FX 700 supercomputer, which is equipped with the same central processing unit as the world’s fastest supercomputer, Fugaku.
Qubit Pharmaceuticals defines itself as a deeptech company specializing in the discovery of new drug candidates through simulation and molecular modeling accelerated by hybrid HPC and quantum computing. Its objective is to divide by 2 the time necessary to select and optimize a candidate of interest, and by more than 10 the necessary investments, with quantum computing.