How Will Early Quantum Computing Benefit Computational Methods ?

The first half of 2017 saw considerable news about the imminent impact of quantum computing (QC) on science, math, and data analysis [9]. Diverse viewpoints predict wildly-varying timescales —from years to decades—for initial impact, and debate what types of problems will first be affected. At the 2017 SIAM Annual Meeting, held in Pittsburgh, Pa., this July, we organized a minisymposium entitled “Identifying Computational Methods for Early Benefit from Quantum Computing,” which addressed how QC will become useful to practicing computational scientists. We aimed to identify computational methods that are likely to benefit from QC in the next five years, and share the experiences of early QC application developers.