The creation of two European Quantum Excellence Centres in applications, covering science and industry, will establish a one-stop-shop for industry, academia, and the wider quantum technology user community. This in turn will accelerate the discovery of new quantum-oriented applications and foster their knowledge and uptake. The QECs should be technology-agnostic with a focus on quantum applications for end-users in science and industry. They should also be user-driven and inherently committed to co-designing activities, to ensure that future quantum computing architectures are well-suited for the applications and their users, providing them with a high performance and scalable application base.

QECs should contribute to a library of new quantum applications and open source software platforms used for building quantum computing and simulation applications for specific areas. QECs should provide services supporting different usage models for the community needs, including developing, maintaining, optimising (if needed re-designing) and scaling quantum applications, addressing the full scientific/industrial workflow, testing and validating codes and quality assurance.

QECs should also create meeting places for users and organisations working on similar nascent technologies, and offer specialised training and capacity building measures to develop the human capital resources for increased adoption of quantum computing in industry and academia. This should lead in the end to a quantum-literate ecosystem with the training of a generation of quantum engineers and scientists within a program of focussed research, as well as engagement with community.

Finally, QECs should federate capabilities around Europe, exploiting available competences, and ensuring multi-disciplinarity (and synergies with national/local programmes.

This action is an EU Synergy call. Grants and procurements can be linked with another grant funded from any other EU funding programme. The grants under both calls will be managed as linked actions.

The applications and software to be developed should be platform-agnostic, with plans to test their correct functioning on as many EuroHPC quantum computing platforms as possible. Proposals should include a strategy for skills development, associating required stakeholders when relevant, and plans to allow users from different backgrounds to register and receive support for their issues while experimenting with different quantum computing platforms.

Proposals should include the enhancement of existing quantum applications and their integration with HPC/classical applications towards highly scalable, optimised codes. Moreover, they should set out a streamlined development, collaboration, automated testing and deployment processes throughout the application development and maintenance cycle, for example, by provisioning and using state-of-the-art quantum computing development tools, platforms and software management models.

Proposals should describe envisaged collaborations with the EuroHPC quantum computing infrastructure to implement a robust and reliable automated deployment process for quantum applications, in order to make novel developments timely available to the European quantum user communities.

Proposals should show how the QECs will ensure wider access to codes and foster their uptake by user communities, in particular scientific community, industry, SMEs, and policy-makers. Whenever possible, participants in the QECs should work together to apply for patents for the developed QCS systems and accompanying and/or embedded software.

Finally, proposals should include clear KPIs for the optimal employment of current and/or emerging quantum technologies, allowing the assessment of the progress towards the objectives, both in terms of outputs and ultimate impact.

Proposals should build on or seek collaboration with existing European projects, in particular from the Quantum Technologies Flagship initiative and develop synergies with other relevant European, national or regional initiatives, funding programmes and platforms.

Proposals for QECs should clearly identify their target community (science or industry).