A new study by researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) proposes a blueprint for a software architecture that would integrate quantum computers with high-performance computing (HPC) systems. The study, co-authored by Amir Shehata, Rafael Ferreira da Silva, and Tom Beck, builds on a previous ORNL effort to establish more concrete guidelines for putting this integration into practice.
Key innovations of the study include a unified resource management system designed to coordinate quantum and classical resources, a flexible quantum programming interface that abstracts hardware-specific details, and a quantum platform management interface to simplify the integration of various quantum hardware systems. The proposed framework is hardware-agnostic and is designed to be malleable, allowing it to be adjusted for evolving quantum computing technologies. A quantum controller would connect the two machines and act as an interpreter, translating between quantum and classical computations, with most of the software residing on the classical side.
The study compares the potential increase in computational power to the speeds achieved by combining CPUs and GPUs, which enabled the Frontier supercomputer at ORNL to break the exascale barrier. The researchers note that while quantum computing’s final form may be a long time coming, this flexible software framework can be adjusted for future technologies. Support for this research came from the DOE Advanced Scientific Computing Research program and from ORNL’s Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.
Read the full announcement here, and review the two related publications: “Integrating quantum computing resources into scientific HPC ecosystems” here, and “Bridging Paradigms: Designing for HPC-Quantum Convergence” on arXiv here.
August 31, 2025
Leave A Comment