Atos and OVHcloud, the European leader in cloud computing, announced in November 2021 that they would expand their partnership. On June 9, the two companies announced a partnership in the field of quantum computing: Atos’ Quantum Learning Machine (QLM) will be available “as a service” in the OVHcloud, which will allow research labs, universities, startups and large corporations to benefit from this technology.

Quantum in France

Although France is outpaced by the United States and China, which are investing massively in quantum technology, it has undeniable assets in this field: Nobel prizes, quantum simulators from Atos…

On January 21, 2021, Emmanuel Macron presented the Quantum Plan, the implementation of which had to be postponed because of the pandemic. 1.8 billion euros will be spent between now and 2026 on research (especially for quantum computers, sensors and communications), industry and training, financed by the PIA4 and “France relance”.

Emmanuel Macron declared:

“Quantum is among the few keys to the future that France must have in hand.”

On January 5, the government launched the national quantum computing platform, set up by INRIA, CEA and GENCI, in collaboration with CNRS, which is housed at the Très Grand Centre de Calcul located at CEA DAM (Commissariat à l’énergie atomique et aux énergies renouvelables).

In addition, the first conference of the France Quantum initiative, which aims to bring together the French and European quantum ecosystems and create the champions of tomorrow, will take place on June 14 at the Eiffel Tower. Fanny Bouton from OVHcloud and Cyril Allouche from Atos are among the speakers. It is in this context that Atos and OVHcloud announce to strengthen their partnership.

The Atos-OVHcloud partnership

Atos and OVHcloud have set themselves the mission of contributing to the development of the quantum ecosystem and accelerating technological developments in this sector. Thanks to these two European leaders, private and public players in the ecosystem will benefit from a quantum programming environment wherever they are, so they can develop and experiment with quantum software bricks ” as a service”, while waiting for the actual release of the first quantum computers.

The Quantum Learning Machine (QLM), a quantum software development and simulation platform, uses NVIDIA GPUs to help dramatically increase the speed and scale of quantum simulations, accelerating research into quantum algorithms, quantum information science, new quantum processor architectures, and hybrid quantum/GPU system architectures. It achieves market-leading emulation capabilities, covering three different quantum programming modes (the gate model, the annealing model and the analog model). Its patented quantum compilation technology will pave the way for the first applications optimized for first generation processors called NISQ or Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum.

With QLM deployed at OVHcloud, users will be able to emulate circuits up to 38 qubits in double precision, and solve quantum annealing problems up to 5,000 qubits.

The choice of Atos’ technology for future developments will allow OVHcloud to offer quantum computing solutions in the form of the Jupyter Notebook, which provides developers with greater ease of access. Designed according to free and open standards, the Notebook will offer a variable level of performance depending on the infrastructure, which will benefit from the work already carried out by OVHcloud’s AI teams.

Thierry Souche, CTO, OVHcloud states:

“By announcing this partnership, OVHcloud confirms its ambition to address and make the most cutting-edge technologies accessible to as many people as possible. The quantum revolution and the deployment of the first use cases will not be possible without the Cloud, which guarantees a mode of consumption and freedom of use capable of bringing together expert communities.”

Emmanuel Le Roux, SVP, Director HPC, AI and Quantum, Atos, concludes:

“This partnership is a major step in preparing for the quantum revolution. Thanks to OVHcloud, we can offer a cloud version “as a service” to democratize and share our quantum emulation technologies more widely to prepare for the future. We are convinced that the future of high-performance computing lies in the hybridization of our technologies, between traditional computing and the integration of co-processors, gas pedals, quantum bricks and the Cloud. Already a pioneer in quantum with the launch of our QLM in 2017, then the first emulator on the market, this strategic partnership with OVHcloud is a further step in our quantum strategy.”

Translated from OVHcloud et Atos élargissent leur partenariat pour accélérer le développement de l’informatique quantique