RACKLINEEvening

 

RACKLINEEvening

 

 

Chips & SupplyUnited States

IBM, AMD Mix Quantum and AI at U.S. National Lab

Credited to EE Times · eetimes.com

Useful

Alliance aims to accelerate the creation of scientifically relevant quantum computers by 2028 as part of the Department of Energy’s Quantum Genesis Mission. Leading quantum companies see error correction as a key step toward that goal.

IBM, AMD, and the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE)-funded Quantum Science Center (QSC) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) today announced a new quantum/AI platform to improve quantum error correction, an emerging focus for the industry.

Researchers are making advances in error correction, including early demonstrations that protect quantum information from noise. IBM claims quantum advantage using techniques with guaranteed correctness, showing that quantum computers integrated with classical computers can solve relevant problems better than classical systems alone. The partners aim to amp up progress by bringing more classical computing into the mix.

The project at the Oak Ridge laboratory co-locates IBM’s quantum computers, including the company’s most powerful quantum processor, the 120-qubit IBM Quantum Nighthawk, with ORNL’s Umbra HPC system, running AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs and 5th Gen AMD EPYC CPUs. AMD provides the classical computing foundation for research into error correction, decoding optimization, and software orchestration.

A quantum error is caused by disruptions to the delicate quantum state of a qubit, which operates near absolute zero. Qubits typically need temperatures between 10 and 20 millikelvin (–273.15°C or –459.67°F).

The co-designed platform under development at Oak Ridge in the U.S. state of Tennessee will let researchers evaluate how to knit together classical and quantum computing to advance quantum error correction. The effort supports the DOE’s Quantum Genesis Mission, which targets 100 logical qubits running 100,000 hard operations by late 2028. IBM said it has demonstrated experiments with up to 70 logical qubits and 438 hard operations. For the partners to reach the DoE target, they will need to achieve a roughly 230-fold increase in hard-operation count.

“Today, the question is how to accelerate and optimize error correction to build systems that scientists can use to tackle meaningful problems,” Jay Gambetta, IBM Research director, said in a press statement. “This new co-design platform for quantum error correction allows us to evaluate different approaches and determine the architectures, software, and workflows that will scale.”

Hard operations

In quantum computing, resource theory divides operations into easy (Clifford) and hard (non-Clifford) sets.

Non-Clifford operations are particularly resource-intensive in fault-tolerant quantum computing because they cannot generally be implemented as cheaply as Clifford operations and require additional error-correction resources, Seetharami Seelam, chief architect of Classical System Co-Design for Quantum-Centric Supercomputing at IBM, told EE Times.

All error-correcting codes admit instructions that are cheap to implement and others that are expensive. So, what is “hard” is a result of the choice of code on any given platform, Seelam noted.

The next era of computing will combine quantum computing with decades of innovation across the classical hardware and software ecosystem, AMD EVP Mark Papermaster said.

“We are advancing a holistic approach that integrates quantum processors, HPC, and AI,” Papermaster noted. “This co-design platform is an important step toward building the scalable, efficient computing infrastructure needed to make fault-tolerant quantum computing a reality.”

Solving quantum error-correction challenges is essential to making quantum computing a practical tool for scientific discovery, and that’s a priority for Oak Ridge National Laboratory, according to Travis Humble, director of the Quantum Science Center at ORNL.

Oak Ridge and AMD are partners in what was possibly the world’s first “exascale” computer.

Europe has led the concept of hybrid classical/quantum computing, as Czechia, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg are working to deploy on-site quantum computers that are integrated with classical supercomputing under the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, the Center for Strategic & International Studies, a Washington, DC think tank, noted in a March 2026 report.

“IBM has been leading the way in developing quantum-centric supercomputing for several years, including a reference architecture for integrating quantum processors with CPUs and GPUs into HPC environments that has been used in deployments in both Europe and Japan,” Seelam said. “The ORNL collaboration represents an important next step in applying that approach in the U.S., bringing IBM quantum computers together with ORNL’s high-performance computing infrastructure and AMD CPUs and GPUs.”

Focus on error correction

Leading quantum computing companies see error correction as a critical step toward the first quantum applications that are scientifically and commercially relevant.

Through 2029, Quantinuum expects its Nexus quantum system to automate and simplify error correction, resource management, orchestration, and deployment, enabling developers to build and integrate increasingly capable applications at the logical level.

IBM and Quantinuum are among nine U.S. companies that got $2 billion from the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump to secure the nation’s quantum leadership.

Quantinuum’s Nexus system supports more than 200 organizations, a 45% increase this year, while total job submissions increased tenfold in the 12 months through August 2026 compared with the preceding 12-month period, the company said today in a press release.

“Quantum computers are on the brink of achieving fault tolerance at scale,” José Ignacio Latorre, director of Singapore’s Centre for Quantum Technologies, said in the press release. “It’s exciting: we are entering terra incognita for what we can compute. The new challenge is putting our high-level quantum algorithms into the right form to successfully run on error-corrected hardware. Developer platforms like Nexus help us bridge that gap between quantum algorithm design and deployment.”

IBM said Nighthawk’s high maximum circuit throughput and real-time pulse control enable researchers to test error-correction techniques. Researchers will compare what each technique requires in qubits, time, samples, and classical resources to learn where GPU accelerators, such as AMD’s nodes in the Umbra system, can help the most.

IBM said researchers can use the company’s quantum hardware to measure qubits mid-calculation and act on the results in real time, set the exact timing of the signals that protect qubits from noise, see exactly what the hardware ran, and work directly with raw measurement signals.

Solid partners

The new co-design platform for quantum error correction builds on IBM’s existing collaborations with ORNL and AMD.

Earlier this year, IBM and ORNL demonstrated how workloads running on quantum computers and ORNL’s Frontier supercomputer can simulate magnetic materials and calculate molecular configurations of promising materials for the production of fusion fuel.

IBM has been using AMD GPUs to accelerate the classical diagonalization step in sample-based quantum diagonalization (SQD), a key quantum-centric supercomputing workflow. Last year, the two companies demonstrated an algorithm that efficiently decodes quantum errors on AMD chips. IBM said the partners’ effort with error correction and HPC workflows may support IBM’s path to its Quantum Starling system, the company’s first fault-tolerant quantum computer

From Qubits to Workflows: Rethinking Quantum Computing

IBM Details Quantum, AI Developments in India

Quantum Roadmaps Are Finally Meeting Reality

Canada’s Quantum Sector Sets Sights on Commercialization

RELATED TOPICS: ERROR-CORRECTION SYSTEM, FAULT-TOLERANT QUANTUM COMPUTING, HYBRID QUANTUM COMPUTING, QUANTUM COMPUTING, SEMICONDUCTORS

COMPANIES: AMD, IBM QUANTUM, OAK RIDGE NATIONAL LABORATORY

Alan has worked as an electronics journalist in Asia for most of his career. In addition to EE Times, he has been a reporter and an editor for Bloomberg News and Dow Jones Newswires. He has lived for more than 30 years in Hong Kong and Taipei and has covered tech companies in the greater China region during that time.

Original · EE Times

Front