The NEASQC project brings together academic experts and industrial end-users to investigate and develop a new breed of Quantum-enabled applications that can take advantage of NISQ (Noise Intermediate-Scale Quantum) systems in the near future. NEASQC is use-case driven, addressing practical problems such as drug discovery, CO2 capture, smart energy management, natural language processing, breast cancer detection, probabilistic risk assessment for energy infrastructures or hydrocarbon well optimisation. NEASQC aims to initiate an active European community around NISQ Quantum Computing by providing a common toolset that will attract new industrial users.
NEASQC aims at demonstrating that, though the millions of qubits that will guarantee fully fault-tolerant quantum computing are still far away, there are practical use cases for the NISQ (Noise Intermediate-Scale Quantum) devices that will be available in the near future. NISQ computing can deliver significant advantages when running certain applications, thus bringing game-changing benefits to users, and particularly industrial users.
The NEASQC consortium has chosen a wide selection of NISQ-compatible industrial and financial use-cases, and will develop new quantum software techniques to solve those use-cases with a practical quantum ad-vantage. To achieve this, the project brings together a multidisciplinary consortium of academic and industry experts in Quantum Computing, High Performance Computing, Artificial Intelligence, chemistry…
The ultimate ambition of NEASQC is to en-courage European user communities to investigate NISQ quantum computing. For this purpose, the project consortium will define and make available a complete and common toolset that new industrial actors can use to start their own practical investigation and share their results.
NEASQC also aims to build a much-needed bridge between Quantum Computing hard-ware activities, particularly those of the Quantum Technologies flagship, and the end-user community. Even more than in classical IT, NISQ computing demands a strong cooperation between hardware teams and soft-ware users. We expect our work in use cases will provide strong directions for the development of NISQ machines, what will be very valuable to the nascent quantum hardware industry.
NEASQC OBJECTIVES
- Develop 9 industrial and financial use cases with a practical quantum ad-vantage for NISQ machines.
- Develop open source NISQ programming libraries for industrial use cases, with a view to facilitate quantum computing experimentation for new users.
- Build a strong user community dedicated to industrial NISQ applications.
- Develop software stacks and bench-marks for the Quantum Technology Flag-ship hardware platforms.
NEASQC is one of the projects selected within the second wave of Quantum Flagship projects.
