Minisymposium Presentation

In 1975, the Cray 1 changed the definition of high performance computing (HPC). Essentially a single if extremely large processor, it would not be recognisable to many of those dependent on scientific computing today. Some components that we now see on-chip were in entirely separate cabinets, and hard drives resembled top-loading washing machines.

Modern supercomputers are quite different beasts, consisting of many highly interconnected processors. Vector processing is still delivering high performance, which drives investment in technologies such as GPUs and on-chip SIMD units, but high bandwidth, low-latency, reliable interconnect is paramount to large-scale scientific computation.

Quantum computing is looking more and more likely to become a realistic prospect for scientific computation during our lifetimes. Although exciting, it cannot be embraced without understanding some fundamental differences between this and what is now thought of as ``classical'' computing.

It is widely known that not all problems are are suitable for quantum computation, so it is tempting to consider any future approaches using QPUs to be similar to those taken with modern GPUs. Unfortunately, this simple substitution will not work for fundamental reasons.

In this talk, we explain this and highlight some of the differences.