Dependable Classical-Quantum Computing Systems Engineering

Edoardo Giusto^1*Santiago Nunez-Corrales^2,3*Kaitlin N Smith⁴Phuong Cao²Ed Younis⁵Paolo Rech⁶Flavio Vella⁶Betis Baheri⁷Alessandro Cilardo¹Bartolomeo Montrucchio⁸Weiwen Jiang⁹Shuai Xu¹⁰Samudra Dasgupta¹¹Ravishankar K Iyer²Travis S Humble¹¹

• ¹University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy
• ²University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, Illinois, United States
• ³National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Urbana, Illinois, United States
• ⁴Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, United States
• ⁵Berkeley Lab (DOE), Berkeley, California, United States
• ⁶University of Trento, Trento, Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol, Italy
• ⁷Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, United States
• ⁸Polytechnic University of Turin, Turin, Piedmont, Italy
• ⁹George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, United States
• ¹⁰Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, United States
• ¹¹Oak Ridge National Laboratory (DOE), Oak Ridge, Tennessee, United States

Increasing evidence suggests quantum computing (QC) complements traditional High-Performance Computing (HPC) by leveraging its unique capabilities, leading to the emergence of a new, hybrid paradigm, QHPC. However, this integration introduces new challenges, with dependability-defined by reproducibility, resiliency, and security and privacy-emerging as a central concern for building trustworthy systems that provide an advantage to the users. This paper proposes a framework for dependable QHPC system design, organized around these three pillars.We identify integration challenges, anticipate roadblocks, and highlight productive synergies across QC, HPC, cloud platforms, and network security. Drawing from both classical computing principles and quantum-specific insights, we present a roadmap for co-design that supports robust hybrid architectures. Our approach offers concrete metrics for assessing dependability, provides design guidance for engineers working at the QC-HPC interface, and surfaces new engineering questions around complexity, scale, and fault tolerance. Ultimately, designing for dependability is key to realizing practical, scalable QHPC systems and accelerating the broader quantum ecosystem capable of translating quantum promises into actual application delivery.