Topic

Quantum computing offers the possibility of strong computational advantage that can influence a wide range of computational fields, but that advantage requires scoping out and determining the abilities of quantum hardware for specific use cases. The goal of this subtopic is to develop and improve quantum, quantum-inspired, and hybrid quantum-classical workflows and work towards showing (or disproving) utility or advantage over existing classical state-of-the-art algorithms. Specifically, these methods should be deployed for solving high utility Science Mission Directorate (SMD) problems, such as those related to: how Earth’s climate and environment function and interact; how Earth and human systems impact each other; how and why the Sun varies and affects Earth and the rest of the solar system; how planets and life originate; and how the universe works? The subtopic scope is focused on near-to-mid-term technology needs that are designed to jump start leveraging quantum computing advances made in industry for NASA SMD objectives. SMD sees this as a priority area in which engaging the commercial sector and academia is essential. NASA SMD seeks to remain at the forefront in terms of high-performance computing capabilities for science where advancing high-fidelity modeling and simulation with large data sets is a priority. In particular, SMD seeks quantum methods and techniques tailored to specific problems of scientific interest that are ready and deployable on utility-scale quantum hardware as it develops as well as quantum and physics inspired methods that are deployable on classical supercomputers. This scope is not just about developing quantum and quantum-inspired algorithms, but more so applying and tailoring existing techniques to a high-utility science problem. There is a large gap between an academic/theoretical algorithm and one that has been tailored and scoped to a specific problem and deployable on hardware. In addition, we need to know what hardware advancements are needed to support the proposed methods. Examples of applications of interest include the following, but are not limited to: • Improving on image-to-image translation, noise filtering, data fusion and other data pre-processing tasks (see for example, Ref. [9]). • Identifying actionable extreme weather event triggers. • Optimizing data acquisition tasking and scheduling. • Leveraging quantum computing for 2D and 3D phase unwrapping of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data. • Improving atmospheric and climatology modeling. • Solutions for inverse problems (e.g., retrievals, data fusion, etc). • Improving modeling of stellar evolution and its effect on our solar system. Expertise in the following areas may be useful in responding to this solicitation: • Familiarity with high utility problems of interest to SMD in areas such as climatology, astrophysics, and heliophysics. • Quantum algorithms and software engineering. • Classical high-performance computing. • Quantum circuit simulators. • Classical state-of-the-art techniques for solving the high-utility SMD problems of interest. • Quantum hardware: it is within scope, but not required, to solve small test instances the problems of interest on current Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) or Logical Intermediate Scale Quantum (LISQ) hardware, but this hardware does not need to be provided by the proposing business. Agreements with hardware manufacturers or publicly purchasable quantum compute time is acceptable. Some familiarity with state-of-the-art quantum hardware is warranted for all aspects of the call to ensure the quantum amenability of all parts of the computational workflow. Successful proposers are likely to include experts from all the identified areas of expertise above in order to be able to design approaches that leverage quantum computing to solving high utility problems related to SMD’s mission.