13 September 2023 – Koen Bertels: Quantum software will severely impact our planet and demonstrate the substantial improvement of new quantum hardware compared to classical computers.

Let’s not forget that the computing power of classical hardware will stop growing as the transistor goes below 1nm, signifying entry into the Universe of quantum mechanics.

Even though the quality of physical qubits still needs to be substantially improved, we also need to start working on developing quantum algorithms. The latter is required for basically any scientific and societally relevant issues.

The computer science and software engineering community are heavily reliant on the progress of the physics community, and to some extent, it is lagging in terms of research and concepts. In addition, Quantum Computing logic (QC Logic) is complex and may seem counter-intuitive at first glance.

Quantum advantage cannot be achieved in isolation with hardware only – quantum software is required, too. One aspect we need to understand is that when we execute a quantum algorithm on a classical computer, we must ensure that an explicit parallel version of the quantum algorithm or that the simulator used can parallelise the code.

The parallelism is implicit using a physical qubit, but when using perfect qubits on classical computers, we must fully parallelise the quantum algorithm. Otherwise, we reduce the problem to a very small size without relevance to real-world problems.

Earth Observation applications are gathering vast amounts of data

Satellite Image Classification (SIC) is a key tool for informed decision-making using Earth Observation applications.

These applications are used for urban planning, the management of natural disasters, and energy supply. Currently, 4,852 active satellites are orbiting the Earth that generate an ever-increasing amount of data, estimated to be around 150 TB per day …

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