14/03/2024

Pasqal Emphasises the Role of HPCQS in its Own Corporate Agenda for 2024

As part of a public procurement procedure, the French start-up Pasqal was selected in 2022 to provide two quantum computers for HPCQS this year, which are to be coupled with supercomputers in France and Germany and thus become the centrepiece of our envisaged European hybrid infrastructure for classical and quantum computing. On 12 March, Georges-Olivier Reymond (founder of Pasqal), Loïc Henriet (co-CEO) and Panagiotis Barkoutsos (SVP of Quantum Algorithms and Use Cases) presented Pasqal's business model and use cases already tested during the webinar 'Roadmap to Quantum Readiness with a Full Stack Approach & Transformative Use Cases', highlighting the prominent role of HPCQS as the first major customer for the company's 'Orion Beta' system.

In the one-hour webinar, participants were given a detailed presentation of Pasqal's planned path to the market launch of its full stack quantum technology, comprising both software and hardware. By 2025, experienced but also inexperienced users from science and industry shall be able to use the open source technology based on neutral atoms with initial applications. According to Pasqal CEO Georges-Olivier Reymond and Co-CEO Loïc Henriet, HPCQS will play a key role on the road to this milestone. On the one hand, the collaboration with our consortium opens up the possibility for Pasqal to network and exchange with scientific partners, HPC centres, start-ups and companies on the way to meaningful use cases that can be implemented to test and improve the Pasqal hardware. On the other hand, with the Beta version of the 'Orion' system, the first two quantum computers from Pasqal will be handed over to their customers in 2024 at the TGCC (Très Grand Centre de Calcul) computing centre of HPCQS partner CEA and at JSC (Jülich Supercomputing Centre) of Forschungszentrum Jülich. This gives science and industry the opportunity to use the system in the cloud for the first time. Pasqal is thus paving the way for the world's first hybrid HPC-QC ecosystem as part of HPCQS.

Use cases for the 'Orion' system took up a large part of the webinar, as they represent the added societal value of the technologies developed by Pasqal. The list of possible applications ranges from molecular chemistry to the optimisation of 5G networks and quantum materials. Use case expert Panagiotis Barkoutsos presented, among other things, an example of drug development. At the end of last year, the simulation of protein-ligand interactions was implemented on the Alpha version of the 'Orion' system in order to determine the presence of water molecules in proteins and thus accelerate the discovery of new medicines. Such tests of use cases on the Alpha version of the Pasqal device enable the optimisation of algorithms and the Quantum Processing Unit towards the Beta model, which is being installed this year for HPCQS in France and Germany and will be made available to a broad user base as of next year.