Accelerating Scientific Applications with the Quantum Edge: A Drug Design Use Case

Abstract

To address increasing demands of computational resources, scientific applications started to support different type of hardware accelerators, e.g., GPUs, TPUs, ASICs. However, due to the limitation to scalability of hardware resources posed by the Moore Law, a conspicuous amount of research is focusing in integration of Quantum Computers in the overall computing continuum. The high amount of data and the high heterogeneity of quantum architectures necessitate development and integration of additional hardware/software layers to facilitate integration of quantum hardware into the overall computing continuum. In this work, we discuss the possibility of applying edge computing to address this issue, laying the fundamentals to the concept of the Quantum Edge. Further, we present and analyse a drug design use case, identifying challenges and future research directions for Quantum Edge.