St. Paul, Minnesota and Paris – September 9, 2025 – Fault-tolerant quantum computing company Alice & Bob and HPC-AI industry analyst firm Hyperion Research, today released a joint report detailing how early fault-tolerant quantum computing (eFTQC1) will, within the next five years, enable solutions to critical scientific applications that are beyond classical supercomputing capabilities.
The study, “Seizing Quantum’s Edge: Why and How HPC Should Prepare for eFTQC,” provides guidance on how HPC professionals can engage today in the design and integration of useful hybrid workflows for near-term applications.
According to the report, up to 50 percent of HPC workloads at research institutions, such as Los Alamos National Laboratory, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center and U.S. Department of Energy leadership computing facilities, could benefit from eFTQC.
“Quantum technologies are a pivotal opportunity for the HPC community, offering the potential to significantly accelerate, and often enable, a wide range of critical science and engineering applications in the near-term,” said Bob Sorensen, Senior Vice President and Chief Analyst for Quantum Computing at Hyperion Research. “However, these machines won’t be plug-and-play, so HPC centers should begin preparing for integration now, ensuring they can both influence system design and gain early operational expertise.”
The report describes how physical limits on transistor size and chip energy capacity have slowed CPU gains — the end of Moore’s law — in classical systems in the past 10 years. Meanwhile, the timeline to useful quantum computing applications has shortened, as evidenced by the 1000x reduction in the estimated resources required to run Shor’s algorithm.
The report projects that in the next five years, quantum computers, with 100 to 1,000 logical qubits and a logical error rate between 10-6 and 10-10, will significantly accelerate scientific computing, starting with materials science applications and rapidly reaching quantum chemistry and fusion energy simulations.
- eFTQC: Early Fault Tolerant Quantum Computers, they feature between 100 to 1,000 logical qubits reaching a logical error rate as low as between 10-6 and 10-10
“HPC users will see benefits in accuracy, time-to-solution and computational cost as hybrid HPC-quantum workflows shift some computationally complex subproblems to quantum processors,” said Théau Peronnin, CEO of Alice & Bob. “HPC centers that want to lead have to co-design these hybrid workflows with users and vendors, shape efficient software and hardware infrastructure and deploy eFTQC prototypes to secure first-mover advantage.”
The report describes how eFTQC, GPUs, and CPUs can be integrated in existing supercomputing centers, and includes recommendations for building the application code for HPC users, developing the hybrid software stack and training the HPC user base for eFTQC adoption.
To establish a quantum-ready workforce and infrastructure and realize the benefits of quantum processing, the report recommends that HPC centers explore heterogeneous workloads by collaborating with quantum vendors today.
“The HPC community has always been quick to adopt disruptive architectures – from vector processors to GPUs – and quantum computing is no exception,” said Juliette Peyronnet, US General Manager at Alice & Bob, who co-authored the report. “This work is a call to action for HPC centers to begin preparing for eFTQC integration now, so they are ready to harness the next major HPC accelerator.”
