Nvidia y Quantum Machines, the Israeli startup that offers an orchestration platform to control and operate quantum processors, have announced the release of the Nvidia DGX Quantum, which combines Nvidia's Grace Hopper superchip with the Quantum Machines controller.
Over the last few years, it has become increasingly clear that to run a quantum computer effectively, many classical computing resources are also needed to control these systems. And these two systems must also be tightly integrated, in part because it is necessary to run calibration and error correction algorithms on classical machines to keep quantum machines running. But each additional calculation cycle also helps to execute additional functions and to evaluate the data from the quantum computer.
"Quantum computers have a very natural use: to power supercomputers," says Itamar Sivan, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Machines. “The most natural place for them, I think, is supercomputing infrastructure and cloud infrastructure. On the one hand, they will be the first places to integrate quantum computing on a larger scale. We want to power these supercomputers with quantum, but we also want to power quantum with supercomputers."
That's what this collaboration is about. You can't run a quantum computer without huge classical computing resources. and for a supercomputer, the quantum essentially becomes another coprocessor to handle specific tasks, similar to how GPUs are often used to speed up machine learning tasks, for example.
"Whether you have a million cubits or hundreds of thousands of cubits and each one has a dozen parameters that need to be optimized independently, community leaders are turning their attention to AI methods, which shine on an NVIDIA platform", explains Tim Costa, Nvidia's director of high-performance and quantum computing. “There is a huge need for computation on the GPU to power a computer that fulfills the promise of quantum. And for that, of course, we have to be closely coupled to quantum, so we need to work with the leader in this field in terms of quantum interface and quantum control, which is the Quantum Machine.”
