Quantum Computing Technology Roadmaps and Capability Assessment for Scientific Computing -- An analysis of use cases from the NERSC workload

Understand

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), as the high-performance computing (HPC) facility for the Department of Energy's Office of Science, recognizes the essential role of quantum computing in its future mission.

• In this report, we analyze the NERSC workload and identify materials science, quantum chemistry, and high-energy physics as the science domains and application areas that stand to benefit most from quantum computers.
• These domains jointly make up over 50% of the current NERSC production workload, which is illustrative of the impact quantum computing could have on NERSC's mission going forward.
• We perform an extensive literature review and determine the quantum resources required to solve classically intractable problems within these science domains.