The road to quantum advantage starts with supercomputing
HPE’s Head of HPC & AI, Trish Damkroger, discusses the role of supercomputing and highlights global collaboration with innovators to realize future solutions for quantum advantage
- HPE celebrates World Quantum Day with world-leading researchers to highlight growing efforts to advance development of quantum computing solutions
- HPE, along with strong ecosystem of world innovators, demonstrate value in combining supercomputing with future quantum accelerators to realize quantum advantage
Quantum is fast becoming a reality that will usher in a new era of opportunity to tackle problems we haven’t been able to solve. The capability will offer a fundamentally different, yet complementary, approach to traditional computing by using quantum physics to process information.
Let’s talk about what this means in solving real-world problems.
We recently discussed quantum problems with Dr. Pascal Elahi at Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre. He shared an example involving precision medicine based on a study that he co-published with other collaborators. He explained how biomarker indicators, such as blood glucose, blood pressure, and cholesterol, are critical to advancing precision medicine as they provide early disease signals that can accurately predict diagnosis and create personalized treatments for patients.
Yet biomarker discovery is complex, involving interactions that emerge from many biological variables. Discovery can often be limited by traditional computing and AI methods alone.
In the study, Dr. Elahi and co-collaborators take a quantum approach with quantum machine learning (QML), which is designed to capture complex and nonlinear patterns in data.
They found that QML has the potential to augment AI capabilities to increase the accuracy of insights and greatly improve predictions when compared to traditional computing and AI methods alone.
Quantum could also dramatically transform other areas of research and innovation. For example, bringing quantum mechanics to the molecular level could optimize the process of simulating molecular behaviors among exponentially larger datasets. The capability could help us in areas like accelerating discovery of new materials used to develop renewable batteries or speed up discovery of drug candidates to bring new, safer medicine to market faster.
Yet achieving quantum advantage to make these breakthroughs is still a journey that requires a new kind of platform. To solve the world's greatest challenges, we believe in a hybrid system that tightly couples distributed quantum processors with classical supercomputing infrastructure, all while leveraging AI to optimize and manage systems.
We’ve been accelerating these efforts to develop quantum solutions, thanks to our HPE Labs team that has dedicated more than a decade’s worth of R&D to quantum.
Realizing quantum advantage with a hybrid supercomputing approach
One of the amazing opportunities I discovered about supercomputing early in my career was how foundational it was to understand and enable emerging technologies.
Supercomputing has always been fundamental to powering traditional high-performance computing workloads, such as modeling and simulation, that the scientific computing community relies on. Over the years, the advancement of supercomputers has allowed us to expand beyond those capabilities and power additional workloads, from data analytics to a rapidly growing era of AI, and now just around the corner, quantum computing.
We see the integration of quantum and supercomputing play a similar role to AI. Just take a look at how GPUs run on supercomputers to power AI workloads. Future quantum accelerators will resemble this approach to support quantum applications.
In fact, we have customers today, some of the world’s leading scientific research centers, already running their quantum prototypes on HPE Cray supercomputers to test and benchmark progress toward quantum advantage.
At HPE, we’ve been accelerating these efforts to develop quantum solutions, thanks to our HPE Labs team that has dedicated more than a decade’s worth of R&D to quantum.
Accelerating the road to quantum through industry collaboration
As a leader in supercomputing, we understand the complexity of integrating and managing technologies within a large-scale infrastructure. The development and scaling of quantum systems won’t be any different.
Building the right system to support quantum requires a combination of purpose-built technologies and a robust ecosystem of solution providers. HPE has been collaborating with the world’s leading innovators to bring powerful technologies together to make quantum a reality.
In November 2025, we launched the Quantum Scaling Alliance (QSA), a major international consortium aimed at moving quantum technology from small-batch production to industrial-scale manufacturing. The alliance, co-led by 2025 Nobel Laureate John Martinis (CTO of Qolab) and HPE Labs’ Dr. Masoud Mohseni, focuses on building a cost-effective, utility-scale quantum supercomputer.
World Quantum Day: Demonstrating quantum progress and the road ahead
We are excited about the potential of quantum and strengthening an ecosystem of partners to advance our journey.
On April 14, on World Quantum Day, HPE experts and collaborators among world-leading research centers, will share more on existing efforts in understanding quantum and the journey ahead.
Hear from leaders at Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, CSC Finland, Leibniz Supercomputing Centre and Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre on their early foundational work in quantum, how they envision a future of quantum-integrated supercomputers, and the types of problems they aim to solve with quantum.
To register for the virtual event, please visit here. I also encourage you to visit our page and speak with our team of experts to learn more about our efforts in quantum computing.
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