Essential connection? NVIDIA launches interconnect for quantum-GPU hybrids

This is a preview edition of Quantum Campus, which shares the latest in quantum science and technology. Read by more than 1,700 researchers, we publish on Fridays and are always looking for news from across the country. Want to see your work featured? Submit your ideas to the editor.

NVIDIA NVQLink

NVIDIA announced its NVQLink architecture, an interconnect to directly connect quantum hardware to GPU-based hardware, this week. The company named 17 companies building quantum systems and nine DOE national labs as launch partners.

“It’s essential for us to connect a quantum computer directly to a GPU supercomputer so that we could do the error correction, so that we could do the artificial intelligence calibration and control of the quantum computer, so that we could do simulations collectively,” NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said at the announcement. “They will work together, fused into one accelerated quantum computing platform.”

Watch Huang’s keynote below.

Infleqtion Squale

On the heels of NVIDIA’s NVQLink announcement, Infleqtion said that it will build a neutral atom-based system using the NVIDIA interconnect at the Illinois Quantum & Microelectronics Park in Chicago. Called Squale-IL, it will “demonstrate how quantum and AI will ultimately operate together in supercomputers and national labs,” according to the company.

“For years, quantum processors and supercomputers have effectively existed in silos, since they have not had a standardized way to connect to each other,” said Pranav Gokhale, CTO of Infleqtion. “Enabling them to operate together in real-time, removes a major bottleneck to scaling quantum computing.”

Quantum sensing

The Center for Strategic & International Studies released a whitepaper on “Quantum Sensing and the Future of Warfare,” saying that the United States faces the disruptive nature of the technology “with fragmented investments and no coherent vision.” It describes a “post-stealth era,” which will eliminate “the comparative advantage of submarines and stealth aircraft, reshaping nuclear deterrence and conventional warfighting alike.”

Read the article from CSIS.

Superconducting germanium

Researchers at New York University and the University of Queensland used molecular-beam epitaxy to create superconducting germanium, doping germanium with gallium in extreme concentrations.

“Germanium is already a workhorse material for advanced semiconductor technologies, so by showing it can also become superconducting under controlled growth conditions there’s now potential for scalable, foundry-ready quantum devices,” said Queensland’s Peter Jacobson.

This work was published in Nature Nanotechnology.

Quickbits

• Frequency-Noise-Insensitive Universal Control of Kerr-Cat Qubits (PRL)

• Integrated electro-optic digital-to-analogue link for efficient computing and arbitrary waveform generation (Nature Photonics)

• Property-guided inverse design of metal-organic frameworks using quantum natural language processing (npj Computational Materials)

Quantum Campus is edited by Bill Bell, a science writer and marketing consultant who has covered physics and high-performance computing for more than 25 years. Disclosure statement.