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Comment by orgiazzi | Hacker News Reader

Great to hear that there is space in this industry for new companies beyond BBN, IBM and Northrop Grunman!

Have you already applied for funding with Quantum Valley Investments (http://quantumvalleyinvestments.com)? If not you should do so! The funding is not restricted to Canadian or Waterloo Ontario based research, as far as I know.

Are you gonna run HFSS/Comsol/ADS/Qutip... on Amazon EC2, scalable at will, or are you going to invest in your own parallel computing hardware? I can imagine a big chunk of this initial funding is going to go into buying a couple HPC pack licenses...

Best of luck!

Jean-Luc Orgiazzi

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Hi Jean-Luc, Thank you for the kind wishes. Those are some great questions! We are definitely running HFSS, and we've made some small investments in traditional HPC hardware. Our primary use case thus far has been Eigenmode solver, which doesn't parallelize well. We're figuring out how use Driven solver a little more - the HPC packs provides a real boost in that case. We're excited to be expanding the eco-system of companies doing groundbreaking QC work beyond the standard list of big defense contractors :)

I assume you are simulating resonators for ion traps with the eigenmode solver? I had quicker results optimizing with time-domain analysis (CST Microwave Studio), then switching to eigenmode to find the Q, than using frequency domain solver. The time-domain solver is easily spread across multiple GPU.

Hi madengr - Thanks for the comment. We're focused on solid-state qubits right now, not ion traps. Are you building your own GPU-based hardware for your simulations?

Nope, my workstation is a pre-built Tesla Whisper-station from Microway with two Nvidia K20. Also have a 4 node HP blade cluster dedicated for CST and Microwave Office (Axiem), with last generation Tesla GPUs. That 4 node cluster is expanded up to 32 nodes by convincing coworkers to install CST distributing computing solver server. That works really well for parametric sweeps and solvers that can't use GPU. It's sort of a cobbled together system, but it works well.

To what sort of problems are you employing eigenmode analysis, or just 3D EM in general?

It is very cool to see the Quantum Valley Investments fund here. I'm joining the Cory group in the fall and can't wait to get started.

It's a small world...Welcome to IQC! (IQC veteran speaking here)

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