CESGA, the centre of computing, high performance communications systems, and advanced services of the Galician Scientific Community, the University academic system, and the National Scientific Research Council (CSIC), recently installed into their supercomputing facilities a quantum random number generator from Quside, a Barcelona-based quantum technology company offering quantum random number generators (QRNG) for safe connectivity and advanced computation.

Santiago de Compostela — 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.

QRNG to overcome limitations

Many computational problems and workloads from both industry and research rely on stochastic processes, which require an ever-increasing amount of random numbers. Limitations in current means for generating these random numbers lead to reduced performance, inefficient use of compute resources and even potential artifacts in some instances, especially in highly-parallel simulations and simulations of very sensitive quantities. Unfortunately, current data center and supercomputing infrastructures do not have access to high-quality and high-performance random number generators, and their source of physical randomness is either inexistent or very slow.

To overcome the aforementioned difficulties and inefficiencies when running stochastic workloads, CESGA has recently deployed a QRNG from Quside, to offer a unique and more powerful source of random numbers to their users.

Performance improvements and new capabilities

By leveraging Quside’s QRNG, randomized workloads such as Monte Carlo simulations or a variety of physics-inspired simulations can obtain performance improvements of up to 10x, as well as more accurate results thanks to the acceleration on the provision and processing of randomness.

Quside has proven up to multi-Gbps performance rates using its proprietary phase-difusion quantum random number generation technology and a range of hardware acceleration tools. In addition Quside provides proof of origin entropy metrics through their Randomness Metrology module. With this installation, CESGA users can start leveraging this unique new capability in their stochastic workloads.

This is a native quantum technology based infrastructure that CESGA deploys for the Galician and European innovation community. We are convinced that it will make technical and scientific research more efficient and that it will be a valuable aid for the development of new, reliable and trustworthy products and services.

Andrés Gómez, CESGA´s Applications & Project Manager

We’re thrilled by the deployment of this new capability at  CESGA’s facilities. The installation represents a great step to make our QRNG technology easily accessible and available to a wide range of users in the HPC space and further demonstrates CESGA’s commitment to quantum technologies. CESGA’s users of this technology will see significant gains in productivity, accuracy and performance within their simulation, optimisation and prediction applications.

Carlos Abellan, CEO & Co-founder Quside

About CESGA: Galicia Supercomputing Centre is a non profit public foundation supported by the regional government of Galicia (Xunta de Galicia) and by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). CESGA has the mission to contribute to the advancement of Science and Technical Knowledge, by means of research and application of high performance computing and communications, as well as other information technology resources, in collaboration with other institutions, for the profit of society.