Rolls-Royce, Xanadu and Riverlane have unlocked future opportunities to greatly accelerate large simulations of air flowing through jet engines using quantum computing.
Together, the partners have shown how to cut simulation run times from weeks to less than an hour, by integrating Rolls-Royce test simulations into Xanadu's PennyLane software and Riverlane's state-of-the-art quantum algorithms.
Simulating airflow – called computational fluid dynamics (CFD) – is important for designing components in jet engines. It is currently carried out using classical supercomputers, but the required enormous calculations, can take months to complete. However, quantum computers are poised to offer a significant speed advantage, potentially accelerating the simulation time exponentially, leading to much faster design processes for large systems.
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Christoph Sünderhauf, Staff Quantum Scientist at Riverlane, said: To solve problems on a quantum computer, certain parameters of the quantum circuit need to be precomputed classically. This process was traditionally very time-consuming. However, our research, along with that of academic groups, has significantly accelerated this step, enabling the classical preprocessing to keep pace with the quantum computation itself.”
Christian Weedbrook, Chief Executive Officer and Founder of Xanadu said: Our efforts here successfully reduced prototyping runtimes by up to 1000-fold in some instances, overcoming the unsustainable wait times of weeks for Rolls-Royce. To make quantum simulations, and more generally quantum computing, practical for Rolls-Royce, we targeted their specific application and used our Catalyst compiler to optimize their PennyLane programs.
Our work highlights a critical truth for industrial quantum adoption: bottlenecks won't be solved by isolating quantum from classical computing. We must focus on optimizing the hybrid quantum-classical structure to make these applications present a computational advantage.”
This collaboration, supported through joint funding between the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom, demonstrates a maturing partnership for building quantum computing expertise between the two nations. Each company brought their own specialised skills and capabilities: Rolls-Royce provided quantum applications expertise and developed the compiled workflows; Riverlane contributed novel quantum algorithms; and Xanadu provided optimisations to the quantum-classical program written using PennyLane, highlighting the effectiveness of its Catalyst compiler. The collaboration benefited from leveraging a wide pool of expertise to effectively target the end-to-end prototyping process.
