IonQ and Ansys have reported a practical instance of quantum computing outperforming classical computation in a real-world engineering workflow. The demonstration involved running a fluid dynamics simulation related to blood pump design using a hybrid quantum-classical approach on IonQ’s production system. Compared to a fully classical implementation, the quantum-assisted workflow achieved a 12% improvement in processing performance, marking one of the first published cases of quantum speedup in a commercially relevant application.
The experiment utilized IonQ Forte, IonQ’s latest trapped-ion quantum system, to assist with solving a graph optimization subroutine in the Ansys LS-DYNA software. The quantum-enhanced simulation processed a model containing 2.6 million vertices and 40 million edges, representing the complex fluid interactions within medical devices. The speedup was achieved using IonQ’s proprietary quantum optimization method, which can generalize to other industrial problems such as automotive crash analysis, logistics optimization, and portfolio management.
This result demonstrates how near-term quantum hardware can contribute to hybrid high-performance computing workflows, improving time-to-solution in computationally intensive engineering problems. The companies emphasized the applicability of this approach across industries that rely on complex simulations and optimization.
More technical details are available in the forthcoming paper on arXiv here and at IonQ’s announcement here.
March 21, 2025
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