The VLQ quantum computer, which is the first quantum computer in the Czech Republic, was officially put into operation today at the IT4Innovations National Supercomputing Center, part of the Technical University of Ostrava.
VLQ is the second quantum computer in Europe to be publicly accessible. It will be available to European research institutions, universities, industrial companies and the public sector.
Quantum computers can solve tasks that would be too time-consuming for conventional computers, IT4Innovations director Vit Vondrak told journalists.
VLQ cost roughly CZK 125 million, half of which was covered by the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking Euro (HPC JU), the other half by the European LUMI-Q consortium operating the computer, which involved eight European countries: the Czech Republic, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden.
“We will use it for the purposes of the Czech research community, but of course, we are also ready to provide capacity to the private or public sector,” said Vondrak.
VLQ will enable the exploration of new algorithms and applications in quantum machine learning, drug and vaccine development, design of new materials, transport optimisation, and security and defence. One of the first applications to be developed in Ostrava will focus on cleaning satellite images.
“The potential of quantum computers is huge. But today we are somewhere in the early days,” Vondrak said.
However, a quantum computer cannot efficiently solve some tasks that classical computers can solve, so the two types of computers will be linked. VLQ will be integrated into the Karolina supercomputer, said Vondrak.
VLQ is based on 24 physical qubits in a star-shaped topology. This technology offers a connection between qubits that significantly increases the efficiency of quantum computing, thus differentiating VLQ from competing machines.
IT4Innovations is a research, development and innovation centre in the field of high performance computing (HPC), high performance data analytics (HPDA), quantum computing (QC) and artificial intelligence (AI), and their applications in other scientific, industrial and societal fields. Since 2013, it has been operating the most powerful supercomputer systems in the Czech Republic, available to both Czech and foreign research teams from the academic and private sphere.
