Earlier this month at the GTC conference in Washington, D.C., NVIDIA officially unveiled NVIDIA NVQLink, an open system architecture that tightly couples GPU computing performance with quantum processors (QPUs) to create accelerated quantum supercomputers.
NVIDIA emphasized that the development of this architecture was guided by and collaborated with nine national supercomputing centers under the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), including Brookhaven, Fermi, Lawrence Berkeley, Los Alamos, and Oak Ridge, with the goal of accelerating the development of next-generation quantum computing. NVQLink adopts an open strategy and currently supports 17 QPU manufacturers and five controller manufacturers.
Solving the Qubit Control Challenge: NVQLink Provides the Key Interconnect
The fundamental unit of quantum computing, the qubit, is extremely fragile and error-prone, requiring complex calibration, quantum error correction, and other control algorithms for correct operation. These control algorithms must communicate in real time with conventional supercomputers (GPUs) via extremely low-latency, high-throughput connections to effectively suppress qubit errors and enable meaningful quantum applications.
NVIDIA points out that NVQLink was born to provide this critical interconnect, creating the computing environment required for future transformative applications across industries.
“In the near future, every NVIDIA GPU scientific supercomputer will be a hybrid design, tightly coupled with a quantum processor,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. “NVQLink acts as a ‘Rosetta Stone’ connecting quantum and classical supercomputers, uniting them into a single, coherent system and marking the beginning of the quantum-GPU computing era.”
The U.S. Department of Energy is leading the nation's efforts to strengthen its leadership in quantum computing.
U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright also praised the collaboration: "Maintaining American leadership in high-performance computing requires us to build a bridge to the next generation of computing: accelerated quantum supercomputing. NVIDIA NVQLink provides the critical technology to connect world-class GPU supercomputers with emerging quantum processors."
NVQLink provides a unified, turnkey solution that will overcome the key integration challenges quantum researchers face when scaling hardware, supporting a wide range of quantum processors and control hardware systems.
CUDA-Q platform integration simplifies hybrid application development
Researchers and developers will be able to access NVQLink through the NVIDIA CUDA-Q software platform. CUDA-Q allows developers to create and test applications that seamlessly access CPUs, GPUs, and quantum processors, preparing for future hybrid quantum-classical supercomputers.
The NVQLink ecosystem includes a large team of partners. In addition to the nine aforementioned U.S. national laboratories, there are 17 quantum hardware manufacturers, including Alice & Bob, Atom Computing, IonQ, IQM Quantum Computers, Pasqal, Quantinuum, and Rigetti; and five quantum control system manufacturers, including Keysight Technologies, Quantum Machines, and Zurich Instruments.
