AQUA@home
AQUA@home (an acronym for Adiabatic QUantum Algorithms) was a volunteer computing project operated by D-Wave Systems, a quantum computing company based in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.[1] The project ran on the BOINC platform and used the spare processing time of volunteers' computers to predict the performance of superconducting adiabatic quantum computers on problems drawn from fields ranging from materials science to machine learning.[2] AQUA@home designed and analyzed quantum computing algorithms using Quantum Monte Carlo techniques.[3]
The project holds two notable firsts within the BOINC ecosystem: it was the first BOINC project to deploy a multi-threaded application, and the first to deploy an OpenCL application.[4] AQUA@home ceased operating in August 2011.[5]
Background
D-Wave Systems built AQUA@home to support the development of its experimental superconducting adiabatic quantum optimization processors. Before committing hardware resources to a given class of problem, D-Wave researchers wanted to estimate in advance how a quantum annealing processor of a given size and connectivity could be expected to perform.[6] Simulating the relevant quantum-mechanical spin systems classically using Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods is computationally demanding, which made the problem well suited to distributed volunteer computing.[7]
The earliest computations run on AQUA@home calculated expected runtimes for spin glass problems, a class of NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem well suited to the project's processor architecture; this work formed the basis of the project's first publications.[8] A later phase of the project used AQUA@home to estimate the runtime of the quantum adiabatic algorithm on binary classification problems for machine learning, developed in part with researchers from Google.[9]
Software and technical milestones
AQUA@home's client application was written in C and C++ and was notably truly multi-threaded: rather than running one instance of the application per CPU core, a single instance could make use of however many cores were made available to it.[10] This was the first multi-threaded application deployed on the BOINC platform.[11]
In May 2010, AQUA@home deployed the first OpenCL application to run under BOINC, allowing its computations to be accelerated across a mix of multicore CPUs and GPUs from different vendors using a single, portable codebase.[12] Project researchers subsequently published a direct performance comparison between CUDA and OpenCL implementations of the same Quantum Monte Carlo computation kernel.[13]
Outcome
By 2011, D-Wave Systems had largely completed the computations it needed from the volunteer community, and project coordinator Neil Dickson announced that AQUA@home would be shut down.[14] In the shutdown announcement, the project credited its volunteers' contributed computing power as a critical factor in supporting research that led to the D-Wave One, described at the time as the first commercially available quantum computing system.[15] The project formally ceased functioning in August 2011.[16]
Scientific publications
Volunteer computing on AQUA@home directly or indirectly supported a number of peer-reviewed and preprint publications, listed below. A complete, maintained list of papers arising from BOINC-based volunteer computing across all projects, including AQUA@home, can be found on the official BOINC Publications by BOINC Projects page.[17]
- Karimi, Kamran, Neil Dickson and Firas Hamze. High-performance Physics Simulations Using Multi-core CPUs and GPGPUs in a Volunteer Computing Context. The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications (2011). DOI: 10.1177/1094342010372928.
- Hamze, Firas, Neil Dickson and Kamran Karimi. Robust Parameter Selection for Parallel Tempering. (2010). DOI: 10.48550/ARXIV.1004.2840.
- Dickson, Neil G., Kamran Karimi and Firas Hamze. Importance of Explicit Vectorization for CPU and GPU Software Performance. (2010). DOI: 10.48550/ARXIV.1004.0024.
- Karimi, Kamran, Neil G. Dickson, Firas Hamze et al. Investigating the Performance of an Adiabatic Quantum Optimization Processor. (2010). DOI: 10.48550/ARXIV.1006.4147.
- Karimi, Kamran, Neil Dickson and Firas Hamze. A Performance Comparison of CUDA and OpenCL. (2011).
See also
References
- ↑ AQUA@home. Wikipedia. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
- ↑ AQUA@home. Wikipedia. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
- ↑ (2010-07-30).Aqua@home. Overclock.net. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
- ↑ AQUA@home. Wikipedia. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
- ↑ AQUA@home. Wikipedia. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
- ↑ (2008-12-07).Dwave Quantum Computer Performance Estimates and Calculations. NextBigFuture.com. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
- ↑ (2008-12-07).Dwave Quantum Computer Performance Estimates and Calculations. NextBigFuture.com. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
- ↑ (2008-12-07).Dwave Quantum Computer Performance Estimates and Calculations. NextBigFuture.com. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
- ↑ (2008-12-07).Dwave Quantum Computer Performance Estimates and Calculations. NextBigFuture.com. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
- ↑ (2010-07-30).Aqua@home. Overclock.net. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
- ↑ (2010-03-31).High-Performance Physics Simulations Using Multi-Core CPUs and GPGPUs in a Volunteer Computing Context. The International Journal of High Performance Computing Applications. pp. 61–69. DOI: 10.1177/1094342010372928
- ↑ News archive. BOINC. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
- ↑ (2011-05-16).A Performance Comparison of CUDA and OpenCL. DOI: 10.48550/ARXIV.1005.2581
- ↑ Completed Projects. TZM BOINC Project. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
- ↑ Completed Projects. TZM BOINC Project. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
- ↑ AQUA@home. Wikipedia. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
- ↑ Publications by BOINC Projects. BOINC. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
External links
- http://aqua.dwavesys.com/ (site no longer active; archived snapshots may be available via the Wayback Machine)
- BOINC: Publications by BOINC Projects
- AQUA@home on Wikipedia