Future of Computing - On the Road to Quantum

About this Course

Future computer technologies and trends are the topics of a new online course that the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) is launching on the 3rd of November. This three-week course is offered free of charge on the IT learning platform openHPI and titled "Future of Computing - on the Road to Quantum". Prof. Dr. Andreas Polze, leading the Operating Systems and Middleware Group at the HPI will give the course together with the IBM experts Hildegard Gerhardy and Dr. Wolfgang Maier. Registration for this Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), which will be held in English, is possible at https://open.hpi.de/courses/ibmpower2020.

"Computer systems of the future will be increasingly heterogeneous. Hardware accelerators such as GPUs (graphics processing units), FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays), or specialized chips will play an increasingly important role - alongside classic CPUs" says Dr. Maier, head of hardware development at the IBM laboratory in Böblingen. It is important to find out which application can benefit most from which resource. "Likewise, existing topics such as reliability, high availability, and service-friendliness of the systems must be included. These require highly developed, sophisticated hardware, operating systems, and platform- independent software - the middleware - to be able to handle requests on a large scale," says HPI Professor Polze.

Another trend that future systems will have to deal with is energy consumption. "This cross-cutting issue is crucial because the resource consumption of IT systems is not only an important factor globally" says Prof. Polze. The placement of computation and data on CPUs, GPUs, and FPGAs can save a lot of energy.

"One-third of the course will introduce participants to the subject of quantum computing," explains Hildegard Gerhardy, who is responsible for supervising academic initiatives on behalf of IBM. She points out that IBM, in cooperation with the Fraunhofer Institute, is recently implementing IBM Quantum System One, the first cloud accessible quantum computer in Germany. "Although there are still major technical challenges, quantum computers have the potential to massively accelerate certain algorithms or to enable completely new computing approaches," adds Dr. Maier. For example, to find a value in an unsorted database, a normal computer has to test all combinations. A quantum computer could carry out these steps all at the same time and thus be much faster.

The course is aimed at IT enthusiasts with basic knowledge of computer science and algorithms. The workload for the course has to be calculated - depending on previous knowledge - at a total of about six hours per week. This includes short video lessons, quizzes, and a final exam. Questions can be asked and clarified in the discussion forum. A certificate from the Hasso Plattner Institute can be obtained for this free online course. Universities can decide on the allocation of ECTS credits for students on their responsibility.

Course Contents

Digitalization and exponential growth of data are challenges for future IT-Systems. They need to leverage accelerators of different kinds, such as GPUs, FPGAs as well as special-purpose units to meet these new requirements. This in turn will lead to more heterogeneous systems and the interconnection of these different units becomes a field of innovation. However, the integration into the system as well as programming models still offers room for improvement. Cache coherent interconnects like OpenCAPI, CCIX and CXL are examples of recent developments. We will give you an introduction to OpenCAPI and show new possible computing models.

New system architectures like edge computing place computing capabilities closer to the data-producing facilities. Open questions like the best placement of computing tasks, dependability, and others remain. Workloads will nevertheless use the cloud, but there will be data or other workloads which won't be moved to a third-party provider. Thus the interconnection of the private cloud and the public need to address those challenges. With microservices, there is a way to structure and deploy applications on these computing infrastructures.

Completely different computing paradigms, such as quantum computing become available. It becomes clear, that it will accelerate certain algorithms and requires software to be compatible with this new way of computing. There are still technical challenges to solve, but quantum computers will soon be ready to make a significant impact. IBM experts leading the field will present to you the current status of this exciting new technology.

Week 1 – Technology Trends

• Beyond Computer Architecture (Prof. Dr. Andreas Polze)
• On the Road to Quantum Computing (Dr. Wolfgang Maier)
• Energy-aware Computing (Max Plauth)
• Artificial Intelligence (Ulrich Walther)
• Edge Computing (Markus Lorch, Ph.D.)

Week 2 – New System Architecture

• Hybrid Cloud (Boas Betzler)
• Building Modern Applications at Scale (Isabell Sippli)
• Programming Models for Massively Parallel Systems (Dr. Thilo Maurer)
• System Integration of FPGAs (Bruno Mesnet & Alexandre Castellane)

Week 3 – Quantum Computing

• History and Area of Application (Konstantin Konson)
• Quantum Computing - How does this work? (Dr. Johannes Greiner)
• Hands-on Experience (Konstantin Konson and Dr. Johannes Greiner)
• Quantum Security Implications (Dr. Silvio Dragone)
• The Fraunhofer Quantum Project (Dr. Ingolf Wittmann)

Speakers