Practical HPCQC Integration with QDMI: A Real-Hardware Case Study with IQM Systems
This work addresses the integration complexity for HPC centers and quantum computing users, offering a practical, incremental solution to standardize software-hardware boundaries.
The paper tackles the challenge of integrating quantum computers into HPC centers by proposing a standardized integration path using the Quantum Device Management Interface (QDMI), demonstrated with IQM superconducting systems to connect hardware to Slurm and Qiskit workflows, resulting in a publicly available implementation that simplifies operations and promotes reusability across providers.
Quantum computers are moving into HPC centers, and the main challenge is now integration rather than pure hardware access. Many current software paths still depend on vendor-specific adapter chains between user SDKs, schedulers, and backend APIs. This pattern makes operations more complex than necessary and slows the transition from pilots to production workflows. We present a practical integration path centered on the Quantum Device Management Interface (QDMI). Using IQM superconducting systems as a hardware case study, we implement an IQM-backed QDMI layer and connect it to two software layers that HPC centers working with quantum computers already care about: Slurm-based job execution and Qiskit-facing user workflows. The implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/iqm-finland/QDMI-on-IQM. The key message is simple: integrating quantum hardware into HPC does not have to be a bespoke engineering effort for each backend. Once the software-hardware boundary is standardized, large parts of the stack become reusable across providers and deployment styles. Our results do not claim that standardization eliminates all HPCQC challenges. They show that this specific boundary can already be standardized today in a way that is practical for users, operators, and vendors.