Hands-on workshop “Quantum Software on Real Quantum Computers”

11 November, 2019

We experience the benefits of classical computing every day. However, there are challenges that today’s systems will never be able to solve. For problems above a certain size and complexity, we don’t have enough computational power on Earth to tackle them. To stand a chance at solving some of these problems, we need a new kind of computing. Universal quantum computers leverage the quantum mechanical phenomena of superposition and entanglement to create states that scale exponentially with number of qubits, or quantum bits.

Quantum supremacy is nowadays a fact: researchers have been able to use a quantum computer to perform a single calculation that no conventional computers, even the biggest supercomputer, can perform in a reasonable amount of time.

The University of Trieste is no new to this topic as students can sign up for Master degree in Data Science and Scientific Computing that aims at educating and training the professionals for the future.

The Department of Physics of the University of Trieste, in collaboration with IBM, has organized the first hands-on workshop on “Quantum Software on Real Quantum Computers” on Tuesday 29th October 2019. The workshop was led by Dr M. Grossi (IBM) with an Introduction and a Tutorial on quantum gates. The 40 participants had the chance to try quantum software on their own computers and therefore experience first-hand the quantum potential.