Eviden, the advanced computing unit of Atos, announced two quantum computing partnerships this morning, with HPCNow!, a Barcelona-based HPC consulting firm, and with Alice & Bob, a quantum computing company in Paris.
With Alice & Bob, Eviden will make Alice & Bob’s cat qubit technology accessible on Qaptiva, Eviden’s quantum application development platform. Eviden said cat qubits have promise for solving one of quantum computing’s biggest problem: computational errors.
“Their innovative hardware-efficient design will reduce the hardware requirements for a fault-tolerant quantum computer by up to 60 times compared to other qubit technologies,” Eviden said in its announcement. Qaptiva users will “be able to learn how to use the biased noise of cat qubits to implement quantum error correction, a crucial mechanism to escape the noise plaguing all quantum computers,” Eviden said.
Founded in 2020, Alice & Bob has raised €30M in venture capital.
“The Qaptiva platform enables our customers to explore the rich universe of quantum computing technologies, and today’s addition makes it richer than ever,” said Cédric Bourrasset, global head of HPC-AI and quantum computing at Eviden. “Alice & Bob’s cat qubits are a fascinating building block for fault-tolerant quantum computers.”
With HPCNow!, Eviden has signed an agreement to jointly develop quantum and HPC solutions.
Eviden’s position in European HPC “will give HPCNow! access to a multitude of new clients, sectors and locations. HPCNow!, in turn, will work with Eviden by providing its expertise with the launch and integration of international supercomputing clusters to expand its global reach by targeting large corporate enterprises in sectors, including the public sector, finance, healthcare and telecommunications, as well as laboratories and universities focused on scientific research,” the companies said.
José Camacho, Eviden’s Director of HPC & Quantum in Iberia, notes that “allows us to establish new areas of collaboration that respond to the new technological and business challenges that are transforming both the world of supercomputing and quantum Computing”.
Eviden and HPCNow! collaborated on the installation of the Finisterrae III supercomputer for the Galician Supercomputing Center (CESGA), which increased the computing power of its predecessor 12-fold, according to the companies. Comprised of standard compute, FAT, GPU and visualization nodes, the operations department of HPCNow! was in charge of installing the cluster deployment system, as well as the queuing system, based on Slurm, monitoring and installing a Lustre parallel file system with a hierarchical storage system (HSM).
The Hercules supercomputer deployed at the Andalusian Science and Computer Center (CICA), based on Eviden’s BullSequana X400 architecture, is among the five most powerful systems in Spain. Deployment of the cluster included software for cluster monitoring and development tools, as well as the performance of benchmarks and acceptance tests.
