The SFTC Hartree Centre is one of Europe’s leading supercomputing centres dedicated to industry engagement and the partnership will provide UK industrial and scientific users with access to Quantinuum’s H-Series, the world’s highest-performing trapped-ion quantum computers, via the cloud and on-premise.
“Research and scientific discovery are central to our culture at Quantinuum,” said Raj Hazra, CEO of Quantinuum. “As we accelerate quantum computing, the Hartree Centre and the UK quantum ecosystem will be on the forefront of building solutions powered by quantum computers at scale.”
Both organisations aim to support UK businesses and research organisations in exploring quantum advantage in quantum chemistry, computational biology, quantum artificial intelligence and quantum-augmented cybersecurity. The UK has a strong global reputation in each domain, and quantum computing is expected to accelerate development in the coming years.
“Quantinuum’s H-Series hardware will benefit scientists across various areas of research, including exascale computing algorithms, fusion energy development, climate resilience and more,” said Kate Royse, Director of the STFC Hartree Centre. “This partnership also furthers our five-year plan to unlock the high growth potential of advanced digital technologies for UK industry.”
The Hartree Centre is part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) – within UK Research and Innovation – building on an established scientific heritage and a network of international expertise. The centre’s experts collaborate with industry and the research community to explore the latest technologies, upskill teams and apply practical digital solutions across supercomputing, data science and AI.
Quantinuum’s H-Series quantum computers are said to be the highest-performing in the world and have consistently held the world record for quantum volume, a widely used benchmark for quantum computing performance, for over three years and currently standing at 220.
In April 2024, Quantinuum and Microsoft reported a breakthrough demonstration of four reliable logical qubits using quantum error correction – an important technology necessary for practical quantum computing. During the same month, Quantinuum’s H-Series computer became the first to achieve “three 9s” – 99.9% – two-qubit gate fidelity across all qubit pairs in a production device, a critical milestone that enables fault-tolerant quantum computing.
Quantinuum – formerly known as Cambridge Quantum prior to its 2021 combination with Honeywell Quantum Solutions – was one of the UK government’s delivery partners, following the 2014 launch of the National Quantum Technologies Programme. Cambridge Quantum ran the Quantum Readiness Programme for several years to inspire UK business and industry to invest in quantum computing to explore the potential use cases of this revolutionary technology.
Earlier this year, Quantinuum was selected as a winner in the £15m SBRI Quantum Catalyst Fund, to support the UK Government in delivering the benefits of quantum technologies, with an initial focus on simulating actinide chemistry using quantum computers.
