Quantum Randomness for Supercomputing
As part of the infrastructures associated with the Galician Quantum Technologies Pole, CESGA implemented a quantum random number generator from QRANGE partner Quside to offer its user community greater capacities for stochastic workloads.
The Galician Supercomputing Center (CESGA) recently installed a quantum random number generator from Quside, a Barcelona-based quantum technology company that offers quantum random number generators for secure connectivity and advanced computing.
It is an infrastructure based on native quantum technology that CESGA deploys for the Galician and European innovation community. This will contribute to making scientific-technical research more efficient and will be a valuable aid for the development of new safe and reliable products and services.
Last November of 2021, a seminar on the use of this new infrastructure was held, attended by more than 50 members of research groups from the three Galician universities, centres of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), as well as ICT companies, biotechnology and finance, as well as technical staff from CESGA itself.
The availability of large quantities of high-quality, high-performance random numbers has become an essential requirement in many fields. Its application ranges from high-quality encryption keys, which encrypt the exponential growth of data transfers, to the creation of highly accurate and time-efficient simulations for finance, insurance, engineering and science.
Cybersecurity is now a priority that can be leveraged by using quantum random number generators to increase the entropy of secure keys, making hacking activities more difficult. For example, adding additional information to the hash of documents, generating two authentication factors, or creating confinable keys for encryption or signatures. Also, true random order is needed (eg for fair booking queues or lists), these generators can be used to create confined and unpredictable orders.
In the technical area, many computational problems and workloads in both industry and research are based on stochastic processes, which require an increasing number of random numbers. Limitations in the current means of generating these random numbers lead to poor performance, inefficient use of computing resources, and even potential artefacts in some cases, particularly in highly parallel simulations, especially for very sensitive quantities. Unfortunately, it is rare for today’s data centres and supercomputing infrastructures to have access to high-performance, high-quality random number generators, and their source of physical randomness tends to be very slow or even.
By leveraging Quside’s QRNG, random workloads such as Monte Carlo simulations or a variety of physics-inspired simulations can achieve performance improvements of up to 10x, as well as more accurate results thanks to accelerated provisioning and processing. of randomness.
To improve cybersecurity, create new reliable services for the public and private sectors, and overcome the aforementioned difficulties and inefficiencies when executing stochastic workloads, CESGA has implemented this quantum random number generator, to offer a single and more powerful source of random numbers to its users and the innovative ecosystem.
Quside QRNG has demonstrated throughput rates of up to several Gbps using its proprietary phase diffusion quantum random number generation technology and a range of hardware acceleration tools. Additionally, Quside provides source entropy metric testing through its random metrology module. With this installation, CESGA users can begin to take advantage of this unique new capacity in their stochastic workloads.
Quside builds quantum technologies for safer connectivity and advanced computation. A spin-off of ICFO – The Institute of Photonic Sciences – in Barcelona, Spain, Quside has a 10+ year heritage in the development and research of quantum technologies and is commercializing innovative quantum random number generators and other hardware solutions. Quside is an active member of the European quantum community and the Quantum Industry Consortium (QuIC) as well as a key contributor in a variety of projects for the European Commission (Qrange and Civiq projects for the Quantum Flagship program) and National efforts (Clave, Caramuel, QuSpin).