Quantum computers show great potential for enabling efficient solutions to a variety of important problems, where classical computers suffer from excessive time and/or space complexity. This rich set of problems spanning cryptography and optimization, to name a few, goes far beyond efficient simulation of quantum mechanics, which gave rise to this exciting computing discipline originally. Rigorous efforts from industry and academia to pave the way for practical quantum computers at scale have recently rendered proof-of-concept demonstrations featuring more than 50 qubits. However, significantly larger quantum systems by at least five orders of magnitude are required to unlock the quantum advantage over classical computers.
The current state of quantum computing is often compared to classical computing in the 1950s, when the fundamental building blocks existed but the full-fledged system stack did not. Another camp argues that quantum technology is much closer to classical hardware of the late 1930s, when it was unknown what type of building blocks would prevail or how they would be integrated to construct useful machines. In either case, we may regard the development of classical computers decades ago as a roadmap for the development of quantum computers today, although quantum computers are inherently different and appear to pose greater challenges.
This special issue of IEEE Micro welcomes academic and industrial research on quantum computing in broad across the system stack. Topics include, but are not limited to:
- Fault-tolerant quantum computing (scalable error correction)
- Application mapping (compilers, runtimes, etc.) and design automation, and acceleration thereof
- Simulation of quantum computers on classical systems
- Benchmarking quantum systems
- Practical implementations of noisy-intermediate-scale quantum machines
- Quantum algorithms
- Quantum programming languages
- Distributed quantum computing
Important Dates
Submission Deadline: February 26, 2021
Initial notifications: April 6, 2021
Revised papers due: June 7, 2021
Final notifications: June 28, 2021
Final versions due: July 12, 2021
Publication: September/October 2021
Submission Guidelines
Please see the Author Information page and the Magazine Peer Review page for more information. Please submit electronically through ScholarOne Manuscripts, selecting this special-issue option. Submissions must be original work not published or under review elsewhere.
Questions?
Contact guest editor Ulya Karpuzcu (ukarpuzc@umn.edu) or Editor in Chief Lizy John (ljohn@ece.utexas.edu).
