The European Commission has launched Q-VERSE (Quantum Virtual Ecosystem for a unified Runtime for agnostic Software Engineering), a 36-month Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Action (Grant ID: 101293734) under the European Quantum Flagship initiative. Coordinated by Fraunhofer FOKUS with €5 million ($5.67 million USD) in funding, the 13-partner consortium aims to develop an open, vendor-agnostic software stack designed to decouple high-level quantum application development from low-level physical QPU architectures across gate-based processors, quantum annealers, and high-performance computing (HPC) clusters.
Positioning the open-source Eclipse Qrisp framework as its baseline high-level programming language, Q-VERSE addresses compiler fragmentation, noise mitigation, and classical-quantum integration. The platform establishes standardized intermediate representations combining OpenQASM and LLVM-based Quantum Intermediate Representation (QIR) to support dynamic backend capability discovery—automatically querying real-time QPU gate sets, connectivity graphs, and noise profiles at runtime. Software interaction layers will deploy gRPC and RESTful API bindings for job orchestration, connecting top-tier application frameworks with backend QPUs and quantum annealing solvers.
| [ Q-VERSE Project Architecture & Key Consortium Work Packages ] | ||
|---|---|---|
| Consortium Leadership | Core Enablers & Technical Scope | Standardization & Deployment Targets |
| • Coordinator: Fraunhofer FOKUS • Integration Lead: Simula Research Lab • Partners: Multiverse Computing, DB Systel, Eclipse Foundation, OTE, Tecnalia | • Hybrid Orchestration: AI-driven (GNN & Reinforcement Learning) workload splitting • Testing & Noise: Automated probabilistic flaw detection & transfer learning noise models | • OpenQASM & LLVM-based QIR runtime targets • Eclipse Qrisp SDK & gRPC/REST job APIs • 5 Industrial Use Cases: Railway scheduling, finance, pharma, telecom |
Simula Research Laboratory leads Work Package 4 (Quantum Enablers and Integration Components), focusing on automated software testing, machine-learning-driven noise mitigation, and real-time performance benchmarking. To evaluate platform resilience against real-world NISQ hardware constraints, the ecosystem will be validated across five industrial pilot domains, including DB Systel railway dispatch scheduling, financial portfolio optimization, pharmaceutical molecular design, and telecommunications data analytics.
Review the project overview on the European Quantum Flagship Q-VERSE Portal here and inspect software stack developments via Fraunhofer FOKUS Quality Engineering here.
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