IBM Quantum Data Center Marks Strategic Move for European Capabilities

IBM launched a European quantum data center in Ehningen, Germany, on Oct. 1, the company’s second in the world and the first outside the U.S. It features two 127-qubit IBM Quantum Eagle-based systems, with a 133-qubit IBM Quantum Heron-based system set to follow.

In this Q&A, Juan Bernabe Moreno, IBM director of research, discusses the strategy behind the new facility, the European quantum ecosystem and the use cases it can enable.

Enter Quantum: What were the strategic decisions behind choosing Ehningen as the location for IBM’s first quantum data center in Europe?

Juan Bernabe Moreno: We have our headquarters for the DACH region – Germany, Austria, and Switzerland – there. We also have our R&D center in Germany so access to good expertise. We also have a history with quantum systems in Germany, for example, with the Fraunhofer Institute.

Why is it important to have an independent European quantum hub?

It fits very well with the EU agenda in terms of having capabilities on the ground. We have an increasing number of EU clients, and sometimes they are more comfortable running their jobs within the EU boundaries.

It’s important to say that our entire data processing is GDPR compliant, no matter where we do it from. We also collaborate with the EU and the European Commission so that can power the emerging and thriving EU quantum ecosystem, which is developing at a great pace.

Related:How Logical Qubits Power Quantum Computing’s Journey to Stage 2

Why is it important to build a quantum community around the hub?

Quantum is all about community. We are very much focused on developing the best hardware possible so that we get the community to start developing their own ideas. One of the key reasons why IBM has made such great progress in quantum is because, from the very beginning, we understood the value of the community.

We opened our systems so that people could access them over the cloud and made our open-source quantum development kit Qiskit available in 2016. We got a lot of traction from many types of users right at the beginning, initially academic and scientific but more and more we saw commercial users.

We learned that we need the community to learn that we are creating something very unique, one breakthrough after another. Because we are just writing the agenda as we go, we need the community to help us understand what's key for them.

The communities can be topic related. We have working groups where we get people from, say, health care and life sciences or from high energy physics together all across the world. There are other more localized communities, for example in Bavaria in Germany there is a Munich Quantum Valley, which is very localized.

Related:5 Ways Quantum Will Transform Everyday Life

I think it's important for communities to be located where they want to be located. We are bringing our systems to this European data center but also providing them with the option to work globally. That's how the system is designed.

The data center will open with two 127-qubit Eagle quantum processors to be followed by a 133-qubit Heron processor. Why did you choose these models?

We decided to go over 100 qubits because you can’t simulate anything with fewer than that classically. That's how we are pushing our strategy worldwide, not only in Europe. We’re starting with these two Eagle processors, one of which was originally hosted at Fraunhofer.  

We are very excited about this because we are moving from thinking as a monolith, in terms of quantum needs a bigger and bigger system, and we started introducing modularity. Why is it important? Modularity means that you can start designing things as systems, as we do today, classically.

You have different components such as CPUs and GPUs, they have different jobs, and they are specialized. Here, we doubled down on improving the intra-QPU and inter-QPU architecture.

Two of IBM’s European quantum customers, Bosch and E.ON, mentioned using quantum to support the energy transition. What quantum sustainability applications are there?

Sustainability has many aspects. In the energy space, you start from generation up to the end customer, and every aspect presents several challenges.

One example is energy grids, they’re probably the best piece of engineering that we've created as humans. They're the backbone of our society.

But they're very complex systems, and as we try to digitalize them and make them more intelligent, we start having algorithmic problems that we couldn't even tackle before. For example, designing the best-performing topology of an energy grid. That’s a problem that is very hard to tackle classically. One of the use cases that we've done with the E.ON was the vehicle-to-grid. It's a massive optimization problem with several problems where you have demand predictions and forecasting.

Think of something like the weather, understanding what and where it's going to be is proving to be more and more critical; think of the hurricanes affecting Florida, for example. We’re trying to tackle that at the macro level classically.

But when you go further down into the granularity, at the micro level, then you start entering the realm of particles and fluid dynamics. Fluid dynamics are governed by the so-called Navier-Stokes equations, which are very complex partial differential equations that are very difficult to solve classically. Quantum might be a new way of trying to solve these partial differential equations. Those are concrete examples where we think that quantum could open new doors.

What other quantum use cases will the new data center support?

Health care licenses are another one where we have very high hopes. In Europe, we've been working very closely together with Nestlé. For high energy physics working with CERN and continuing the work that we are doing with Fraunhofer. The financial sector will also benefit from quantum algorithmic capabilities.

The beauty of quantum computing is it's a capability that has applications in each and every sector.