Quantum computing might still be in its infancy, but it's hardly a buzzword anymore, and leading computing experts are already preparing for the future generation of users.
In February, computing staff from the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory took part in the 2025 Winter Classic Invitational Student Cluster Competition . The annual virtual event introduces college students to high-performance computing and provides hands-on access to industry-leading data centers. For the first time in the competition's 5-year history, students also gained access to quantum computing resources courtesy of ORNL's partner and quantum hardware provider IQM . This unprecedented opportunity to work with cutting-edge HPC systems also enabled the students to explore the next major leap in computational technology - quantum computing.
In addition to staff from the lab's Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, or OLCF, the event also included mentors from Amazon, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and the Pittsburgh Computing Center. Each mentor organization designs its own set of challenge problems - based on real-world scenarios - for the students to solve.
"This is our fourth year as a mentor organization for the competition. The Winter Classic is a great entry-level opportunity to get hands-on HPC experience, especially for students from smaller universities," said OLCF HPC engineer and event coordinator Dan Dietz. "We teach them a little bit about the science and how to run the code, and they're given a week to solve a challenge problem. At the end the week, the teams are evaluated, and a winner is selected."
For the ORNL challenge , the students were tasked with benchmarking a quantum algorithm designed to solve linear systems of equations - a fundamental HPC operation - based on a technique widely used in computational fluid dynamics simulations.
"We designed a problem that is very similar to what HPC users experience all the time when running big simulations such as those found in many engineering and fundamental science applications, of which this algorithm is an integral part," said OLCF computational scientist Murali Gopalakrishnan Meena. "Part of our motivation for the challenge problem was also to help bridge the gap between users in classical HPC and the quantum computing communities."
Benchmarking the algorithm followed a three-stage process. First, students used the OLCF's Odo system to simulate how the algorithm would perform under ideal conditions. Odo is the OLCF's 32-node training system built with the same GPU architecture as Frontier, the world's most powerful supercomputer for open science.
Next, they introduced simulated noise - background interference inherent to quantum computers - to observe the effects. Finally, they ran the algorithm on IQM's quantum computer in Finland to test it on a real quantum device. Gathering reliable data meant the students had to run the algorithm thousands of times over the course of a week.
Gopalakrishnan Meena said one of the long-term goals is to better understand how to use quantum processing units, or QPUs, to accelerate certain parts of a code, similar to how GPUs on Frontier are used as accelerators.
"The challenge problem was designed to use both QPUs and CPUs at once so we can see what the pros and cons are while running on Odo and the IQM computers. Being able to explore and develop on both the classical side and the quantum computing side is something we haven't been able to do much of until now," Gopalakrishnan Meena added. "But we're not just developing the hardware, we're also training the next generation of users."
The OLCF's Quantum Computing User Program , or QCUP, currently partners with IBM Quantum, IQM, IonQ, and Quantinuum to provide users with access to a variety of commercial quantum computing resources for scientific discovery and innovation. Normally reserved for active QCUP projects, the Winter Classic marked the first time that the OLCF extended quantum computing training resources to users outside the program.
"We've never done anything like this before, so we weren't sure what hurdles there would be, but we knew everyone wanted it to happen," said OLCF HPC engineer Michael Sandoval. "This was really the first big endeavor to train users, and now it's explicitly part of the QCUP program."
Sandoval, in addition to his role in HPC, is the quantum computing lead for the OLCF's User Assistance group. He helps users with access to different cloud resources and ensures smooth operations. Part of the QCUP mission, said Sandoval, is to evaluate quantum technology in the U.S. and around the world, but QCUP also aims to develop the future's quantum computing workforce.
"The Winter Classic is a great way to introduce students to quantum computing who typically don't have access to it in their day-to-day life. It's not something they can just say, 'I'm going to run on this quantum computer, it's just over here,'" Sandoval added. "But the goal is to make that a reality for them."
OLCF's first quantum computer - a 2-qubit, room-temperature, diamond-based quantum accelerator developed by Quantum Brilliance - is scheduled to be installed in 2025. It will be integrated into the OLCF's broader suite of computing resources as an experimental platform.
The 2025 Winter Classic drew a record number of student teams, including participants from California State University Channel Islands, Fayetteville State University, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, Prairie View A&M University, Texas Tech University, UC Riverside, UC Santa Cruz, the University of New Mexico, and the University of Texas at El Paso.
In addition to Dietz, Gopalakrishnan Meena, and Sandoval, other OLCF contributors to the Winter Classic included Chao Lu, Antigoni Georgiadou, Kalyan Gottiparthi, John Holmen, and Verónica Melesse Vergara.
The OLCF is a DOE Office of Science user facility.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE's Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. DOE's Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, visit https://energy.gov/science .
