Pawsey adding iron to quantum lab

Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre has tapped NVIDIA to boost its quantum computing research capabilities.

The organisation has announced it will acquire NVIDIA’s CUDA quantum platform for its National Supercomputing and Quantum Computing Innovation Hub.

Pawsey said the system will let it run quantum workloads “directly from traditional high performance computing systems”.

This will support development of hybrid algorithms that divide calculations into classical and quantum kernels, the centre said.

“Quantum machine learning, chemistry simulations, image processing for radio astronomy, financial analysis, bioinformatics and specialised quantum simulators will be studied, starting with various quantum variational algorithms,” Pawsey said.

CUDA Quantum is an open-source hybrid quantum platform, and Pawsey’s configuration will include eight nodes based on the vendor’s Grace Hopper HPC-scale CPU/GPU “superchip”.

The chip combines the Grace CPU with an H100 Tensor Core GPU in a single package, eliminating the need for a PCIe connection between GPU and CPU.

“Pawsey Centre’s research and test-bed facility is helping to advance scientific exploration for all of Australia as well as the world,” executive director Mark Stickells said.

“NVIDIA’s CUDA Quantum platform will allow our scientists to push the boundaries of what’s possible in quantum computing research.”