ASCR Workshop on Quantum Computing for Science

At the request of the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), this program committee has been tasked with organizing a workshop to assess the viability of quantum computing technologies to meet the computational requirements in support of DOE's science and energy mission and to identify the potential impact of these technologies. As part of the process, the program committee is soliciting community input in the form of position papers. The program committee will review these position papers and, based on the fit of their area of expertise and interest, selected contributors will have the opportunity to participate in the workshop currently planned for February 17-18th, 2015 in Bethesda, MD.

ASCR is one of the 6 interdisciplinary scientific program offices within the Office of Science (http://science.energy.gov/ ) along with Basic Energy Sciences, Biological and Environmental Research, Fusion Energy Sciences, High Energy Physics and Nuclear Physics. ASCR's mission is to discover, develop, and deploy computational and networking capabilities to analyze, model, simulate, and predict complex phenomena important to the DOE (http://science.energy.gov/ascr/). Please refer to http://www.csm.ornl.gov/workshops/ascrqcs2015/links.html for background materials and links related to Office of Science and ASCR.

Research into quantum computing technologies is making rapid progress and it is important for ASCR to understand the utilization of these new technologies for DOE-relevant applications and their impact on conventional computing systems. The goal of the workshop is to explore the following topics:

  1. Mission relevance: What aspects of DOE's science mission are suitable for quantum computing? What are the early tests that will demonstrate viability, or lack thereof, for the DOE's mission in fundamental and applied sciences?
  2. Impact on Computing: How will quantum computing improve the properties of the computation with respect to conventional contemporary computational systems? Such attributes include, but are not limited, to performance, capacity, power, cost, generality and programmability.
  3. Challenges: What are the challenges in adopting quantum computing technologies and developing the required infrastructure? What algorithm/application bottlenecks need to be solved before a quantum enabled system can be used for mission critical applications? What can ASCR do to mitigate these challenges?

To this end, we anticipate that discussions at the workshop will encompass the following broad areas:

  1. Models of quantum computation and programming environments, including computational models (quantum walks, gate- and Hamiltonian-based computation), topological computing, error correction and fault tolerance, programming and compiling codes, control theory, resource requirements, computational complexity theory.
  2. Physical science applications relevant to DOE's science mission including but not limited to quantum field theories, lattice models (Hubbard, Ising, QCD), quantum chemistry and molecular structure, complexity and thermalization.
  3. Applied mathematics topics including potential quantum algorithms for eigenvalue problems and phase estimation, tensor contraction, machine learning, graph algorithms, approximation algorithms, numerical integration, optimization, partial differential equations, n-body problems, streaming and data-analysis problems.

Topics that are out-of-scope for the workshop include discussions solely focused on theoretical foundations, exploration and comparison of underlying specific device technologies and applications clearly out of DOE's fundamental and applied sciences mission scope, e.g. cryptography, communication, etc.

Requirements:

Position papers should clearly explain the relevance of the contributors' research interests to the goal of the workshop and the anticipated discussion areas.  Each position paper should provide contact information (name, institution, email address) for a single, corresponding author and should be no more than 2 pages in length (no smaller than 11-point font) including cited references.

Submission:

The position papers should be submitted to using the EasyChair submission system located at the conference website no later than December 5th, 2014 11:59 PM ET.

Conference Web Site
http://www.csm.ornl.gov/workshops/ascrqcs2015

Selection:

The workshop will consist of an initial DOE/ASCR overview and plenary talks followed by break-out discussion sessions. The break-out discussion sessions will be organized around the submissions. Selected contributors will be notified by December 19th, 2014. The workshop discussions will help create a report that will be submitted to ASCR.
Participants will be expected to fund their own travel and accommodations for the workshop.

Summary:

Length and Format: Up to 2 pages (references included), at least 11-point font PDF file.
Due Date: 11:59 PM ET on December 5th, 2014.
Notification of Selection: December 19th, 2014
Workshop Date: February 17-18th, 2015.

Program Committee:

Sponsor:

Department of Energy, Office of Science, Advanced Scientific Computing Research
Contact: Ceren Susut-Bennett

 

 

Oak Ridge National Laboratory