MATLAB training on VSC helped Dr. Anna Francuz (University of Vienna) accelerate code and achieve progress in quantum many-body research.
Before large-scale quantum computers become a reality, researchers must run small-scale simulations to test theories and better understand complex quantum systems. That’s exactly the kind of work Dr. Anna Francuz is doing at the University of Vienna, where she investigates the complex behavior of strongly entangled quantum systems.
In 2024, Dr. Francuz attended a parallel computing with MATLAB workshop organised by the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC), MathWorks, and EuroCC Austria. The course introduced participants to MATLAB’s capabilities for High-Performance Computing (HPC) and showed them how to run MATLAB code on VSC. After the hands-on training, Dr. Francuz was able to speed up simulations and explore new levels of complexity in her research project.
In her own words, Dr. Francuz explains the impact of the MATLAB training on VSC:
"Phase diagrams are a crucial tool in the study of quantum many-body systems because they show how a system changes under different conditions — for example, shifting from a superconducting to an insulating state. To create these diagrams, we calculate the system’s ground state over many parameter values. Doing this on a laptop can be painfully slow — and sometimes impossible due to memory limits."
"To overcome this, we’re now performing these calculations on the Vienna Scientific Cluster using MATLAB Parallel Server™. That allows us to model much larger quantum systems and compare them directly with experimental data. We’re currently exploring phase diagrams for a programmable quantum simulator that operates with 256 quantum bits (qubits) — an exciting direction for our work with 2D tensor networks."
Thanks to this training and access to Austria’s most powerful supercomputers — VSC-4 (37,920 cores) and VSC-5 (98,560 cores) — Dr. Francuz and her team are now pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in quantum simulation.
Read the full article by Dr. Anna Francuz
Upcoming workshop: Parallel computing with MATLAB on 25 June 2025