International Workshop QuAASI’16

The international workshop "Quantum Annealing and its Applications in Science and Industry (QuAASi’16)" will take place from 26 to 28 July 2016 in the Rotunda of the Jülich Supercomputing Centre. The goal of the two-day workshop, followed by a D-Wave Exploration Day, is to bring together researchers from different communities to discuss the challenges in using quantum annealing to solve some real-world problems and in optimizing and designing existing and future quantum annealing hardware.

Quantum annealing is a technique, inspired by the classical simulated annealing techniques based on temperature fluctuations, for finding the global minimum of a function by a process using quantum fluctuations. It is mainly used for optimization problems that have a discrete search space with many local minima. Many challenging optimization problems of this kind play a role in scientific research and in industrial applications.

D-Wave is the first company that has commercialized quantum annealers. Its quantum annealer is a programmable artificial spin system manufactured as an integrated circuit of superconducting qubits. Qubits or quantum bits are the elementary building blocks of a quantum computer, similar to the bits in a digital computer. The latest D-Wave system, D-Wave 2X, is a 1000-qubit quantum annealer. Although discussions on whether the D-Wave machines outperform classical optimizers are continuing, it is clear that the availability of operational hardware allows the potential of quantum annealing to be explored for a range of real-world applications as of today.

This two-day workshop will provide participants with the opportunity to discuss the potential of quantum annealing for pure scientific and more applied purposes. The D-Wave Exploration Day will allow a limited number of selected participants to get a feeling of how to use a quantum annealer for computation. The talks, given by invited speakers, will cover topics including the history of quantum annealing, adiabatic quantum computation, quantum annealing algorithms for optimization problems in science and industry, and D-Wave’s quantum annealing architecture.

More information on the workshop can soon be found at http://www.fz-juelich.de/ias/jsc/events/quaasi16.
(Contact: Prof. Kristel Michielsen, k.michielsen@fz-juelich.de)

JSC News No. 241, 11 May 2016