Quantum computing company Quantinuum has signed a joint statement of endeavour with the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to provide the Hartree Centre in Daresbury, Cheshire with access to its H-Series quantum computers.
Under the terms of the agreement, Quantinuum’s trapped ion machines will be made available via the cloud and on-premise.
Quantinuum was founded in 2021 when Honeywell spun out its Quantum Solutions division and merged it with UK quantum computing startup Cambridge Quantum Computing. Honeywell owns a 54 percent stake in the company and IBM is also an investor.
The company currently has two ion trap quantum computing offerings, the System Model H1 and the System Model H2, with both the H1-1 and the H2-1 available to customers. The Quantinuum H1 contains 20 fully connected qubits that sit across five Quantum Charged Coupled Device zones, while the H2, which launched in May 2023, was updated in June 2024 to contain 56 qubits of all-to-all connectivity.
The systems supplied to the Hartree Centre by Quantinuum will be made available to research organizations studying quantum chemistry, computational biology, quantum artificial intelligence and quantum-augmented cybersecurity, in addition to UK businesses.
“Quantinuum’s H-Series hardware will benefit scientists across various areas of research, including exascale computing algorithms, fusion energy development, climate resilience and more,” said Kate Royse, director of the STFC Hartree Centre. “This partnership also furthers our five-year plan to unlock the high growth potential of advanced digital technologies for UK industry.”
The Hartree Centre is a high-performance computing, data analytics, and AI research facility that was founded in 2012 at Daresbury Laboratory, which is itself housed on the Sci-Tech Daresbury science and innovation campus.
The STFC is a UK-based government agency that carries out research in science and engineering; its Hartree Centre is part of the United Kingdom Research and Innovation government body.
