Quantum computing requires high-performance software

Quantum computing is maturing at a rapid pace, and it is quite plausible that quantum computers capable of solving problems of value to businesses will be available this decade. At the same time, quantum computing likely will not supplant classical computing in the foreseeable future—after all, quantum computing architectures are best equipped to solve certain problems, but not every problem. Quantum computers almost certainly will work in concert with classical processing, where each computing architecture will handle those parts of a calculation that it is best suited to tackle. For that to happen, the quantum computing hardware will require software that combines quantum with classical computing. It also must be devised in a user-friendly way so that nonquantum scientists and software developers working on problems such as modeling molecules with unprecedented accuracy and calculating interesting properties of structured datasets can run quantum computational tasks without having in-depth knowledge of quantum computing.