Quantum News Nexus

NVIDIA has done more than just about any other company to make us believe in a hybrid quantum-classical future for high-performance computing, and it is again upping its bet in a major way, announcing at its GTC event in Washington, D.C. this week the launch of NVQLink, an architecture for interconnecting QPUs and GPUs to accelerate supercomputing and help quantum processors scale their error correction capabilities.

NVQLink, described by NVIDIA as an open system architecture, follows in the footsteps of the company’s NVLink architecture for linking and clustering GPUs for the purposes of AI computing. The unveiling of NVQLink comes as Nvidia and quantum computing companies are collaborating with much greater frequency on hybrid projects like one in Japan where an NVIDIA-built supercomputer is linked to a QuEra Computing quantum computer. To date, such projects likely would have used Infiniband, PCI Express, or other bridging technologies to interconnect GPUs and QPUs.

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said during his GTC keynote speech that NVQLink’s purpose-built, low-latency, high-throughput architecture will fuel more of these integrations, and enable classical supercomputers to help QPUs improve their error correction capabilities and their ability to produce more logical qubits, making them more practically useful and commercially viable. 

But, in a broad universe of different kinds of quantum computing modalities, NVIDIA is not interested in picking winners; it wants to enable all kinds of architectures.

“There are all kinds of different types of quantum computers–superconducting, photonic, trapped ion, stable [neutral] atom–all kinds of ways to create a quantum computer,” Huang said during a presentation still going on as of this writing. “Well, we now realize that it’s essential for us to connect the quantum computer directly to a GPU supercomputer so that we can do the error correction [to help scale quantum computers], so that we can do the artificial intelligence calibration and control of the quantum computer, and so that we could do simulations collectively, working together, the right algorithms running on the GPUs, the right algorithms running on the QPUs, the two processors, the two computers, working side by side. This is the future of quantum computing.”

Nvidia said the new approach supports at least 17 QPU companies that it has partnered with:

• Alice & Bob
• Anyon Computing
• Atom Computing
• Diraq
• Infleqtion
• IonQ
• IQM Quantum Computers
• ORCA Computing
• Oxford Quantum Circuits
• Pasqal
• Quandela
• Quantinuum
• Quantum Circuits, Inc.
• Quantum Machines
• Quantum Motion
• QuEra
• Rigetti Computing
• SEEQC
• Silicon Quantum Computing

…as well as quantum control system builders, such as Keysight Technologies, Quantum Machines, Qblox, QubiC and Zurich Instruments. 

Development of NVQLink also was influenced by researchers from multiple supercomputing centers at national labs,  including:

• Brookhaven National Laboratory
• Fermi Laboratory
• Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
• Los Alamos National Laboratory
• MIT Lincoln Laboratory
• The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
• Sandia National Laboratories 

That’s a long list of quantum collaborators for a company that began the year by questioning how long it would take before we see useful quantum computers. Huang was the one who made those controversial remarks, but he also said back then in nearly the same breath that it was NVIDIA’s job to help accelerate the utility of quantum computers. NVQLink is a big step toward doing that.

“In the near future, every NVIDIA GPU scientific supercomputer will be hybrid, tightly coupled with quantum processors to expand what is possible with computing,” Huang said. “NVQLink is the Rosetta Stone connecting quantum and classical supercomputers — uniting them into a single, coherent system that marks the onset of the quantum-GPU computing era.”

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright also was quoted in NVIDIA’s press release announcing NVQLink, stating “Maintaining America’s leadership in high-performance computing requires us to build the bridge to the next era of computing: accelerated quantum supercomputing. The deep collaboration between our national laboratories, startups and industry partners like NVIDIA is central to this mission — and NVIDIA NVQLink provides the critical technology to unite world-class GPU supercomputers with emerging quantum processors, creating the powerful systems we need to solve the grand scientific challenges of our time.”

NVIDIA released a link where interested companies can sign up for NVQLink.

Many of the quantum hardware developers listed above were–no surprise–quick to cheer the unveiling of NVQLink. Quantum Circuits, Inc., based in New Haven, Connecticut, came to the Nvidia event to announce the integration of its Aqumen Seeker QPU with NVIDIA’s CUDA-Q software platform for enabling hybrid quantum-classical computing, and the company said NVQLink is key to enabling it “to tighten the synergy between GPUs and its quantum hardware.”

Jérémie Guillaud, VP of Firmware at French firm Alice & Bob, added that NVQLink represents another step toward the quantum sector’s ultimate goal of fault-tolerant quantum computing (FTQC). “We are thrilled to see NVIDIA’s NVQLink addressing the layers of the FTQC stack we’ve long considered critical: logical orchestration, decoding, and live calibration. This launch is a clear signal that fault-tolerant quantum computers, such as Alice & Bob’s QPUs, are about to reach industrial maturity.” 

Mourad Beji, Chief Software Officer at Pasqal, another French quantum computing firm, echoed that sentiment, saying, “This integration with NVIDIA NVQLink marks a major step toward utility-scale quantum computing. NVQLink will allow us to accelerate our roadmaps towards fault-tolerant quantum computing by enabling better logical architectures and improved integration with classical supercomputers.”

There is much more quantum-related news coming out of the GTC event, so look for a follow-up later this week.

Image: Illustration of NVQLink architecture provided by NVIDIA.

Quantum News Nexus is a new site from freelance writer and editor Dan O’Shea that covers quantum computing, quantum sensing, quantum networking, quantum-safe security, and more. You can find him on X @QuantumNewsGuy and doshea14@gmail.com.