Methods and Interfaces for Quantum Acceleration of Scientific Applications

accelerated applicationsWelcome to MIQASA (Methods and Interfaces for Quantum Acceleration of Scientific Applications)! This project is part of the Quantum Testbed Pathfinder program within ASCR. The Pathfinder program itself is part of the larger Quantum Testbed program, which seeks to study the performance and use cases of quantum computing testbeds. We research the feasibility of running scientific applications on near-term quantum computers. We are exploring the design and development of quantum computing for scientific applications in nuclear physics, machine learning, and chemistry. One of our jobs is to foster industry relationships and gain access to multiple quantum computers as they come online, harnessing them for DOE's purposes. We achieve our goals by benchmarking quantum computers that are available today. Benchmarks consist of traditional tomography to assess quantum gate performance, larger collections of gates that represent computational primitives (such as a unitary coupled cluster ansatz, for example), and the applications themselves. In this early, pre-fault tolerant era of quantum computing, referred to as noisy-intermediate-scale-quantum (NISQ) in the literature, the applications themselves can serve as benchmarks. We are developing several benchmarking suites based on cutting edge quantum algorithms available today.