Search

This white paper, developed through close collaboration between IBM Research and UIUC researchers within the IIDAI Institute, envisions transforming hybrid cloud systems to meet the growing complexity of AI workloads through innovative, full-stack co-design approaches, emphasizing usability, manageability, affordability, adaptability, efficiency, and scalability. By integrating cutting-edge technologies such as generative and agentic AI, cross-layer automation and optimization, unified control plane, and composable and adaptive system architecture, the proposed framework addresses critical challenges in energy efficiency, performance, and cost-effectiveness. Incorporating quantum computing as it matures will enable quantum-accelerated simulations for materials science, climate modeling, and other high-impact domains. Collaborative efforts between academia and industry are central to this vision, driving advancements in foundation models for material design and climate solutions, scalable multimodal data processing, and enhanced physics-based AI emulators for applications like weather forecasting and carbon sequestration. Research priorities include advancing AI agentic systems, LLM as an Abstraction (LLMaaA), AI model optimization and unified abstractions across heterogeneous infrastructure, end-to-end edge-cloud transformation, efficient programming model, middleware and platform, secure infrastructure, application-adaptive cloud systems, and new quantum-classical collaborative workflows. These ideas and solutions encompass both theoretical and practical research questions, requiring coordinated input and support from the research community. This joint initiative aims to establish hybrid clouds as secure, efficient, and sustainable platforms, fostering breakthroughs in AI-driven applications and scientific discovery across academia, industry, and society., Comment: 70 pages, 27 figures

Quantum Computing (QC) offers the potential to enhance traditional High-Performance Computing (HPC) workloads by leveraging the unique properties of quantum computers, leading to the emergence of a new paradigm: HPC-QC. While this integration presents new opportunities, it also brings novel challenges, particularly in ensuring the dependability of such hybrid systems. This paper aims to identify integration challenges, anticipate failures, and foster a diverse co-design for HPC-QC systems by bringing together QC, cloud computing, HPC, and network security. The focus of this emerging inter-disciplinary effort is to develop engineering principles that ensure the dependability of hybrid systems, aiming for a more prescriptive co-design cycle. Our framework will help to prevent design pitfalls and accelerate the maturation of the QC technology ecosystem. Key aspects include building resilient HPC-QC systems, analyzing the applicability of conventional techniques to the quantum domain, and exploring the complexity of scaling in such hybrid systems. This underscores the need for performance-reliability metrics specific to this new computational paradigm.

Experience from seven decades of classical computing suggests that a sustainable computer industry depends on a community of software engineers writing programs to address a wide variety of specific end-user needs, achieving both performance and utility in the process. Quantum computing is an emerging technology, and we do not yet have the insight to understand what quantum software tools and practices will best support researchers, software engineers, or applications specialists. Developers for today's quantum computers are grappling with the low-level details of the hardware, and progress towards scalable devices does not yet suggest what higher-level abstractions may look like. In this paper, we analyze and reframe the current state of the quantum software stack using the language of programming models. We propose an abstraction hierarchy to support quantum software engineering and discuss the consequences of overlaps across the programming, execution, and hardware models found in current technologies. We exercise this hierarchy for solving the eigenvalue estimation problem in two ways (a variational algorithm with error mitigation, and phase estimation with error correction) and pinpoint key differences in these approaches in terms of these layered models and their overlaps. While our work points to concrete conceptual challenges and gaps in quantum programming and proposes some specific steps forward, our primary thesis is that progress hinges on thinking about the abstraction hierarchy holistically, and not just about its components., Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures. Submitted to IEEE QCE 24

Understanding realistic complex systems requires confronting significant conceptual, theoretical and experimental limitations rooted in the persistence of views that originated in the mechanics of simple moving bodies. We define the category of complex multiscale stochastic systems as a useful device for capturing the minimally required complexity of many types of phenomena. In doing so, we provide evidence indicating that determinism, continuity and reversibility can lead to theoretical inadequacies that manifest as intractability, inaccuracies or non-representativeness when applied to complex systems. We take the view that interactions are fundamental and summarize their portrayal across many disciplines. Despite their centrality, interactions remain largely neglected as subjects of research interest of their own. We hypothesize that a generalized theory of interactions may help organize evidence from multiple scientific domains towards a more unified realistic view of systems.

After discussing the significance of interactions to understand complex multiscale stochastic systems (CMSS), we turn our attention to the construction of a Generalised Theory of Interactions (GToI). We define interactions as discrete, localised events where the thermodynamically irreversible exchange of degrees of freedom involves signal propagation and relaxation phenomena. We proceed to define the mechanics of such space, as well as how these approximately map onto dynamical manifolds. By characterising various systems through the effect of transformations across interaction space, we develop a view of systems where features such as emergence and information representation become apparent. Our theory appears to capture structural and dynamical features of CMSS efficiently by making explicit the extent of the dynamical range of action in them; we identify the boundaries of such range with statistical limits corresponding to physical laws, and derive a generalised form of the Correspondence Principle.

Existing abstract models of quantum computation make reference to circuit elements, much in contrast to their classical counterparts. Circuits, as a model of computation, substantially limit algorithmic expression and obscure high-level connections between problems and quantum resources. It is argued here that new models are needed to achieve high-level algorithmic expressiveness that allow composable procedural abstractions to manifest, leading to the development of instructions in the sense usually understood in high-level programming languages. Doing so appears essential to the discovery of new quantum algorithms, and deeper understanding of how quantum resources compose into useful patterns, or \emph{quantum motifs}. To achieve this, stronger investment in the intersection between higher-algebra, mathematical physics and quantum science is required to cope with future challenges brought forth by \textit{very large quantum scale integration}., Comment: DoE ASCR Basic Research Needs in Quantum Computing and Networking, July 11-13 Gaithersburg MD