The innovations were shown to businesses, universities, data centre providers and users at a demonstration day at BT’s R&D centre – Adastral Park in Ipswich.
Supported by a consortium of 14 organisations and universities with backing from Innovate UK, the project aims to nurture the development of practical computing and security applications, while establishing a blueprint for the ‘data centre of the future’.
With BT and KETS leading the architecture and communications project, partners including Riverlane, PQShield, NCC Group, BP, Digital Catapult and Imperial College London showcased the latest innovations.
Richard Murray, PhD, co-founder and CEO of ORCA Computing said: “It’s been a highly successful day, with attendees actively engaged in discussions surrounding the challenges and opportunities presented by integrating quantum technologies into secure data centre environments.
“The valuable feedback and insights garnered will be instrumental in creating hybrid quantum/classical use cases moving forward."
ORCA demonstrated PT-1 photonic quantum computer running a hybrid quantum-classical machine learning algorithm with GPUs involving NVIDIA CUDA’s quantum demo.
Andrew Lord, senior manager of optical networks and quantum research at BT Group said: “The Quantum Data Centre of the Future project represents a significant step towards developing a quantum internet, with access to quantum resources in future data centres.
“Even before full-scale quantum computers are available, it is crucial to prove that they can be fully integrated into the next generation internet”.
