CINECA and AWS bring new quantum computing capabilities to the Italian research community

CINECA and AWS are collaborating on a series of quantum computing research initiatives to help to accelerate the next generation of computational capabilities and enable new research in Italy.

CINECA is a consortium made up of 70 Italian universities and four national research institutes to form the leading high-performance computing (HPC) research center in Italy. CINECA operates one of the world’s largest computing centers which supports cutting edge research by providing access to state-of-the-art HPC systems. One of their systems, Marconi-100, is ranked 14th in the TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputer in the world.

CINECA’s headquarter in Bologna, Italy.

To broaden CINECA’s computational portfolio beyond classical computing, AWS and Cineca have launched a new collaboration to advance quantum computing research and education across Europe. CINECA has formed a steering committee of quantum computing experts drawn from the CINECA consortium to represent the voice of the quantum computing research community in Italy. This committee will help identify and shape cutting-edge quantum computing research projects that can leverage quantum computing services provided by AWS. AWS plans to support qualifying projects identified by CINECA via AWS Cloud Credits for Research, a program aimed to provide AWS credits to researchers across a range of disciplines.

To promote quantum skills in this interdisciplinary field, CINECA and AWS will host a series of workshops to deepen the quantum expertise of the HPC research community. CINECA-affiliated academics and developers from different scientific fields will have the opportunity to design and run quantum computational experiments on the cloud using Amazon Braket, the AWS quantum computing service. Amazon Braket provides on-demand access to different quantum computing technologies, circuit simulators, and a flexible development environment.

The first workshop, planned for November 24th, 2021, will be a Practical Quantum Computing School, an online course dedicated to the use of quantum computers in the cloud. This is a unique opportunity for students and researchers to gain hands-on experience in using quantum computers, while learning from leading experts in the field.

This collaboration with CINECA is a continuation of AWS’s support of directed and independent research in quantum computing around the globe. If you are planning research in quantum computing, give Amazon Braket a try, or contact us via email, your AWS account manager or the AWS Cloud Credit for Research program.