EuroHPC JU quantum devices and HPC-QC access in practice

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking now offers quantum computers that you can apply to use and, if your application is granted, use free of charge. This lesson is a practical guide to getting onboarded and running your first jobs on three of them: Euro-Q-Exa at LRZ, Piast-Q at PCSS and VLQ at IT4Innovations.

Important

Always refer to the official documentation for the most up-to-date details. The official pages are gathered in one table, Official links, by task.

See also

Start with the overview. ENCCS’s 2025 white paper, Quantum Computing in the EuroHPC JU Ecosystem: A Practical Guide for European SMEs, surveys the EuroHPC quantum computers. This lesson is the hands-on follow-up for three of them.

See also

A tool for the steps in this lesson. eurohpc-qdevices is a small command-line app for these three machines. It checks a machine, sends a fixed list of circuits one job at a time, never sends a job twice, and keeps a record of every job and of the seconds measured for it. See its manual and repository.

Prerequisites

• Basic familiarity with quantum circuits: qubits, gates, shots, and what a Bell pair is.

• The command line, and enough Python to read a short script.

The lesson

• Getting access
• Onboarding
• The machines: differences and a few details
• HPC and HPC-QC
• A few details on Euro-Q-Exa
• A few details on VLQ
• A few details on Piast-Q
• “QPU hours” on the devices

Reference

• Quick Reference

Acknowledgement

This work used EuroHPC Joint Undertaking quantum resources awarded under the Quantum Access call, hosted by LRZ, IT4Innovations and PCSS. We thank the support teams at all three sites.

Each site asks for its own wording, reproduced here as supplied:

We acknowledge EuroHPC JU for awarding project with ID 22/2026 access to the EuroHPC allocation on the Piast-Q trapped-ion quantum computer hosted by the Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center

The authors gratefully acknowledge the use of the quantum system Euro-Q-Exa, co-funded by the EuroHPC JU, BMFTR (grant 13N16690), and the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts, operated by the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) in Garching, Germany, for providing the computational resources for this work.

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic through the e-INFRA CZ (ID:90254)

• For LRZ’s wording, open: LRZ: Acknowledgement formulations

• For IT4Innovations’ wording, open: IT4Innovations: Acknowledgments in publications

• For PCSS’s wording, ask PCSS: PCSS puts each project’s own ID into it.

• IT4Innovations’ VLQ access page says its support will ask for a signed acceptable use policy. That policy (version 4.3) asks that every publication that used IT4Innovations resources carries the e-INFRA CZ acknowledgement and is registered at https://scs.it4i.cz/publications.

ENCCS is the EuroCC National Competence Centre Sweden, part of the EuroCC 3 project (grant 101306701), with partners Linköping University and RISE Research Institutes of Sweden.

See also

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