A Look Back at Workshop QuAASI’16

The international workshop "Quantum Annealing and its Applications in Science and Industry (QuAASI’16)" took place from 26 to 28 July 2016 at Jülich Supercomputing Centre. The goal of the two-day workshop, followed by a D-Wave Exploration Day, was to bring together researchers from different communities to discuss both the challenges in using quantum annealing to approach the solutions of real-world problems and the requirements for the optimization and design of existing and future quantum annealing hardware.

About 60 researchers from Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada participated in the workshop. The talks highlighted the history of quantum annealing and the design of first quantum processors, the implementation of various optimization problems and machine learning, the study of the behaviour and performance of quantum computers (e.g. D-Wave systems), as well as the various approaches designed to extend the applicability of these devices to larger, more connected optimization problems. The D-Wave Exploration Day provided detailed insights into the hardware architecture. Programming techniques and tools available were demonstrated by remotely running examples on one of the D-Wave 2X(TM) quantum computers with more than 1,000 qubits located at the headquarters of D-Wave Systems in Burnaby, Canada.

Today, the range of optimization problems that potentially can be solved on such a machine is still limited. Exploring the potential of quantum annealing on this operational prototypic hardware for a number of real world problems is therefore a challenge that should be taken up.
(Contact: Prof. Kristel Michielsen, k.michielsen@fz-juelich.de)

JSC News, No. 244, 11 October 2016