Finland via the Finnish Technical Resource Center (VTT) is working with CSC, operators of LUMI, a pan-European supercomputer located in CSC’s data center in  Kajaani, Finland to develop quantum algorithm for future applications. 

Finland’s VTT develops quantum algorithms for hybrid systems of the future

LUMI is hosted by the LUMI (Large Unified Modern Infrastructure) consortium made up of countries such as Finland, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Switzerland. It has been proclaimed as the fastest supercomputer in Europe and this makes it suitable to integrate seamlessly with quantum computers.

VTT has progressively integrated quantum computers with LUMI over the years beginning in 2021 when they had 5 qubits. Last year, the number increased to 20 qubits and they are targeting 50 qubits by the end of 2024. Currently, researchers and students are using the system to solve some problems and this is just the beginning.

To this end, Finland is leveraging Shor’s algorithm to process complex computations in this quantized supercomputer to go after major problems in the world. While there are other algorithms, Shor’s Factoring algorithm is highly useful in that it can factor numbers exponentially faster than any known classical computer and this makes it one of the most popular algorithms in quantum computing with a massive potential to beat the world’s best encryption and cryptographic systems.

Upon this quantum-classical architecture that VTT has put in place, quantum algorithms are to be developed to accelerate the performance of supercomputers and it opens up endless opportunities to the capabilities of a hybrid system such as this.

The Team leader at VTT, Ville Kotovirta, said that developers of quantum algorithms can start thinking about what they will be able to do when a bigger quantum computer works together with a classical computer.

The VTT team is researching and developing quantum algorithms and software that would work with their quantum computing system and they need mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and computer scientists to enable the work of development to keep progressing. Ville Kotovirta said that finding these talents is not easy as many of the interested people do not have industry experience and the experienced ones already have jobs outside the Finland ecosystem. 

Despite this, the ecosystem continues to grow and make progress as they are developing different types of algorithms for their hybrid architecture one of which is the quadratic unconstrained binary optimisation (QUBO) problem which can be solved by quantum approximate optimisation algorithms (QAOAs).

“We have built quantum algorithms for analysing graph data and identifying the community structure of networks,” Ville Kotovirta says. “The data comes from complex networks, like technological or biological network systems.”

In addition to this, the team is developing algorithms for quantum chemistry, focusing on reducing the complexities of molecular Hamiltonian to improve simulations on molecules. They are also working on synthetic biology to generate new proteins. Quantum machine learning is also an area of learning of the VTT team where quantum generative machine learning models can learn from existing data to produce novel samples.

Ville Kotovirta says that it is difficult to prove the usefulness of quantum computers over classical computers since they solve complex problems but on a small scale and with low success rates. Finland is looking to position itself right in the future of computing although it may not have enough ‘war chest’ to compete with bigger countries. However, they can find a small niche where this architecture will be applied at a global scale when quantum computers can have high fidelity (success rate of solving problems) in general says Ville Kotovirta.