Hybrid Quantum-Classical: Europe's First Exascale Computer Connects to D-Wave (www.eetimes.eu)

The Jülich Supercomputing Center has installed a D-Wave Advantage 5000+ quantum annealer on-site and is working to tightly couple it with Jupiter, Europe’s first exascale system (ranked No. 4 on TOP500). Rather than rely on cloud access, Jülich chose on‑premises hardware to prototype real-world hybrid workflows, gain operational experience, and enable low-latency, high-bandwidth links between classical CPUs/GPUs and a quantum processing unit (QPU). The plan treats the annealer as a modular accelerator—integrated into job schedulers (e.g., SLURM) so quantum tasks can be spawned within classical simulations and reintegrated seamlessly. This move matters because it advances a pragmatic hybrid model that’s expected to dominate near-term quantum use: quantum devices tackle specific optimization or sampling subproblems while classical HPC handles control, preprocessing and postprocessing. Jülich targets optimization, materials chemistry, protein folding, and quantum machine‑learning workflows, emphasizing energy-efficiency and reproducibility over hype. Technical implications include developing tight orchestration, new scheduler hooks, direct hardware interfaces (avoiding cloud APIs), and an upgrade path (Advantage → Advantage2) to exploit improved connectivity, coherence and noise reduction. The system is slated to be fully operational in 2026 with early prototypes by 2027, and Jülich aims to demonstrate practical advantage within two years of going live.