Quantum networking and single-photon technology company Nu Quantum and quantum software developer SoftwareQ are collaborating to build the theoretical framework for a fault-tolerant quantum computer. Sponsored by the U.K. and Canadian governments, the collaborators have announced plans to propose and benchmark practical architectural solutions. Working as part of the Quarrefour project, Nu Quantum and SoftwareQ are using hardware-software codesign techniques to integrate SoftwareQ’s compiler technology into the real-time firmware of Nu Quantum’s control system. This allows the team to build an architecture that takes maximum advantage of every qubit and link available in a computer, as soon as it becomes ready, accelerating progress towards useful quantum computing. (From left) Michele Mosca, head of quantum algorithms at SoftwareQ; Coral Westoby, senior control engineer at Nu Quantum; Edward Wood, vice president of product at Nu Quantum; Vlad Gheorghiu, CEO and president of SoftwareQ; and Andrew Jena, quantum software engineer at SoftwareQ. Courtesy of James Lambert/SoftwareQ. Specifically, the project seeks to address scalability, the foundation for which is the ability to network quantum computers. The project will quantify the requirements of a network able to combine multiple small and currently realizable quantum computing ‘nodes’ into a larger, usable compute platform, and aim to prove the feasibility of a system able to meet those requirements. The project also seeks to identify the most promising architectures and set real-world performance targets for systems that can first provide experimental proof-of-concept, and then be further exploited towards instantiating a fault-tolerant quantum computer. Funding for Nu Quantum was provided by Innovate UK under the competition Canada UK Commercialising Quantum Technology Programme: CR&D. For SoftwareQ, funding was provided by the National Research Council of Canada through the Industrial Research Assistance Program.