Europe's exascale supercomputer just simulated a 104-qubit quantum machine — with 90% fewer qubits needed

Quantum computers fail easily: their bits are so fragile that correcting errors usually demands enormous machines. At Germany's Jülich Supercomputing Centre, researchers using JUPITER — Europe's first exascale supercomputer, the fastest class of machine in existence — simulated a 104-qubit fault-tolerant quantum processor under realistic noise, in what NVIDIA calls the largest comprehensive simulation of its kind. The work tested a technique called magic-state cultivation that could cut the physical qubits needed for error correction by 90%. If those gains hold in real hardware, reliable quantum computing gets smaller, cheaper and closer — for medicine, finance and materials science alike.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation