Airbus’ perspective on Quantum Computing & … DWave User... · Airbus by numbers (end of 2017) Product & Next-gen R&D expenses 2,011 M€ EBIT 3,428 M€ Aircrafts Delivered in

Airbus’ perspective on

Quantum Computing &

Experience with D-Wave system

Dr. Thierry Botter

12 April 2018

We are a worldwide leader in aeronautics,

space and related services: We make it fly!

Airbus by numbers (end of 2017)

Product & Next-

gen R&D expenses

2,011 M€

EBIT

3,428 M€

Aircrafts Delivered

in 2017:

718

Order Book

950,354 M€

7,265 A/C

Employees

133,782

Airbus

Airbus Defence and Space

75%Airbus Helicopters

Airbus (Group) Revenue

66,800 M€

Airbus & High Performance Computing

Long history of deploying large HPC clusters :

TOP500 29th position, 1st among industries

in 2011 [1]

Most use-cases focus on computationally

heavy simulations for engineering & design

(i.e. CFD, FEM, aeroacoustics, aeroelasticity,

flight & system simulations, …)

[1] https://www.top500.org/site/47306

#1

AIRBUS

#500

TOP500

GFlops

TFlops

PFlops

1993 1996 1999 2002 2005 2008 2011 2014

Airbus & High Performance Computing

Airbus’ investment level into HPC activities:

• Near-term IT solutions: ~3% of IT budget, with main focus on

scaling up methods & tools for industrial production;

• Long-term research activities: ~1% of R&D budget.

R&D focused on extending the HPC toolset: cloud, distributed, multi-

platform (x86/ARM/GPU) … and quantum computing!

HPC activities run as collaborative projects between internal engineers &

external partners to bridge aerospace problems and HPC platforms

Only one relevant metric:

Does a technology provide Airbus with a demonstrated performance

improvement in addressing a specific challenge?

Airbus IT

HPC

Airbus

R&D

HPC

*not to scale

Airbus & Quantum Computing

Quantum Computing (QC) is being investigated as a possible extension to the

HPC toolset.

Open questions for Airbus:

• Can QC contribute to known HPC challenges? How?

• What HPC performance can be achieved with today’s QC at reduced problem

sizes? How do performances scale with problem size?

• How can we prepare ourselves for a QC future? What’s the operational &

business impact? When is the right time to invest in preparations?

Quantum Computing @ Airbus

Why? When? How? What?

Apply HPC philosophy to QC: leverage external ecosystem in tandem with

internal experts to investigate potential applications to Airbus needs.

Strategic investment: Airbus became a seed investor in QC Ware in 2016.

The marriage allowed Airbus to enter the space of Quantum Computing

and have an expert partner to help explore the various corners of the space,

across different QC hardware technologies and different aerospace

applications.

Gateway to Quantum Computing

Airbus is indifferent to the type of quantum hardware implementation /

vendor, and whether any system is truly quantum or not. The only

determining factor is the demonstrated performances of these systems on

relevant Airbus applications / business propositions.

Hardware Agnostic

First QC project conducted with

D-Wave 2000Q machine.

First QC investigation: Fault Tree Analyses

What?

Fault Trees or Dependence Diagrams represent the connection

points between sub-systems and nodes in large, complex

engineering structures. Fault Tree Analyses (FTAs) investigate the

combination of local failures that result in global system failures,

often with mission safety implications.

Applications

Fault trees are relevant across many aerospace systems, including

aircraft, spacecraft and vehicle fleets. They are an integral part of

qualification and certification processes. First QC investigation

focused on FTAs for aircraft.

Why?

NP-hard problem to compute all possible failure modes, and

identify combination of failures that can lead to the safety critical

top-event (i.e. loss of system function). QC is known to have

potential benefits for this type of problem. 12/04/2018 10

Top Event

Basic

event

Intermediate

event

*MMEL: Minimum Mandatory Equipment List

Run T

ime (se

c)

Events+Gates in Tree

First QC investigation: Fault Tree Analyses

• QC hardware: 2000-qubit D-Wave machine.

The quantum annealer could handle FTAs with

up to ~300 events+gates.

• Benchmark against commercial SAT solver

shows competitive performance as timing

does not seem to be related to problem size

• Potential hybrid approach: find the shortest

minimal cut-sets using QA, followed by a

classical computation for the full fault-tree

calculation. Predicted 4x reduction of runtime.

12/04/2018 11

Airbus typical problem

QA

current software

solution

not to scale

Increased QC familiarity

• Project enabled Airbus experts to get first experience in applied QC.

• QC Ware led technical work: translate FTAs into QUBO (language amenable to quantum

annealers), program and run FTAs on D-Wave 2000Q machine, benchmarking against SAT

solver.

Impactful results

• Results demonstrated promise in an important area of Airbus’ business.

• Airbus additionally motivated to continue research on QC because of FTA results.

Lessons learnt

• Work through nomenclature and mathematical framework, incl. terms for consistency checks,

early in project – develop a common language between aerospace and QC worlds.

First QC investigation: Fault Tree Analyses

Airbus & QC in the future

Airbus remains interested in the promise of QC. More projects to come!

The QC strategy in short:

• Hands-on experience through partnerships with external startups &

key players to evaluate selected HPC use-cases.

• Continuous evaluation of available technology & trends, to adapt

investment strategy accordingly .

• Raise awareness within the Airbus HPC community and continue to

research candidate use-cases.