Pawsey's HPC-vQPU turns batch HPC into interactive quantum simulators

Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre researchers Shusen Liu, Pascal Jahan Elahi, and Ugo Varetto have introduced HPC-vQPU, an architecture that transforms batch-scheduled HPC systems into interactive virtual QPUs (quantum processing units) for quantum simulation. The key challenge is that secure HPC clusters use batch schedulers rather than the interactive, backend-oriented interfaces quantum software expects. HPC-vQPU solves this by separating a cloud-facing control plane—which manages device identity, task lifecycle, and snapshot binding—from an HPC-resident execution plane that claims work and runs it via scheduler-backed GPU jobs. Coordination is exclusively outbound and agent-initiated, meaning no inbound network paths are opened into the cluster.

The central innovation is a topology- and calibration-aware device snapshot that is atomically bound at claim time and carried into execution as an immutable contract. This makes each scheduled job hermetic while preserving fresh device semantics. The team implemented HPC-vQPU on Pawsey’s Setonix GPUs using Qiskit-Aer/cuQuantum for simulation and IBM Fez calibration data. Production experiments showed that service overhead is bounded and additive, workload scaling stays confined to the simulator, and calibration-bearing snapshots produce measurable output shifts. Claim-time binding successfully prevented stale execution after pre-claim device mutation, concurrent agents completed 50/50 tasks exactly once, and explicit recovery restored stale running tasks after agent failure.