The Fugaku computer, jointly developed and manufactured by the Fujitsu company and the RIKEN Physical and Chemical Research Institute, will serve as a classic computing solution. The future quantum partner of this system will also be jointly created by Fujitsu and RIKEN, and the first prototype will be built in the city of Wako in Saitama Prefecture by March this year.

Why combine systems

Supercomputers are expected to partially alleviate such “childhood sicknesses” of quantum systems, such as the probabilistic nature of computations (significant error rate) and the short lifespan of qubits’ quantum states.

Today, qubits are actually dependent on ordinary computers that adjust and read their state during the execution of algorithms, so there is nothing fundamentally new and complicated in hybrid quantum-classical calculations. But the complexity of the future task cannot be underestimated – coordinated work in computational mode will require new software environments, tools and even algorithms.

Fugaku Supercomputer / Photo: RIKEN

In preparation for the future collaboration between Fugaku and the as-yet-unnamed quantum system, the RIKEN Institute is forming a development team that will study various computational methods and tools from 2023 to facilitate data transfer between a quantum computer and Fugaku.

The system is expected to be commissioned in 2025. Shortly after that, the partners plan to upgrade the hybrid system to a “faultless” quantum computer. For example, Google promises to create a completely error-free quantum computer by 2029. Japanese engineers want to surpass Google in this regard with a hybrid approach.