The Earliest Arrival of Quantum Utility
The earliest advantageous uses of quantum computing will take the form of a quantum processing unit (QPU) attached to a traditional supercomputer. Supercomputers of the not too distant future will have thousands of GPUs and thousands of CPUs as today, along with one or more QPUs with thousands of qubits.
Overview
Users will decompose their programs and allocate their tasks to this collection of resources. Energy considerations will dominate in an attempt to maximize "science per Joule". Tasks amenable to quantum will be mapped to QPUs, as likely the most energy efficient engine of the three. After that, tasks with sufficient uniformity to exploit GPUs will be mapped there. Finally, CPUs will be the versatile, large-memory resources that they are in today's GPU-CPU supercomputers. We call this QPU/GPU/CPU strategy "quantum first" and we speculate on how rapidly it can ripen. To project the niches in which quantum computing will achieve competitiveness, we first need to project forward the always advancing capabilities of classical computing. Our goal is to bring these two magisteria into conversation by providing a baseline. There are many barriers to realizing this vision today, among which the reliability of quantum devices leads, then their cost until they hit their "Moore's Law", their lack of memory to store the state, the unconverged programming environment, the lack of a trained workforce. However, quantum computing has a secure destiny. It has an excellent big sibling to pattern its growth after, and it will mature by both leveraging and imitating its success.
Presenters
Brief Biography
David Keyes is a professor in the Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences, Computer Science, and Mechanical Engineering programs. He served as a founding dean of the Mathematical and Computer Sciences and Engineering Division from 2009 to 2012 and as the director of the strategic initiative and ultimately the Research Center in Extreme Computing from 2013 to 2024. He is also an adjunct professor and former Fu Foundation Chair Professor of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University, and a faculty affiliate of several laboratories of the U.S. Department of Energy.
Professor Keyes is Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is the recipient of the SIAM Prize for Distinguished Service to the Profession (2011), the Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award of Columbia University (2008), the Sidney Fernbach Award of IEEE Computer Society (2007), and the ACM Gordon Bell Prize (1999), and the Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Natural Sciences of Yale University (1991) .
Keyes graduated summa cum laude in Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences with a certificate in Engineering Physics from Princeton in 1978 and earned a doctorate in Applied Mathematics from Harvard in 1984. He was a Research Associate in Computer Science at Yale University 1984-1985, and has had decadal research appointments at the Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering (ICASE), NASA-Langley Research Center, and the Institute for Scientific Computing Research (ISCR), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.