GENCI brings three quantum technologies into France's national supercomputing
Neutral atoms from Pasqal, photons from Quandela and cat qubits from Alice & Bob, coupled to the Joliot-Curie supercomputer at the CEA's TGCC.
GENCI, France's public supercomputing agency, is integrating quantum machines into its national infrastructure: Pasqal's Ruby and Quandela's Lucy are in service, and Alice & Bob's Kity is to be connected to the Joliot-Curie supercomputer at the CEA's TGCC. GENCI presents this combination of three technologies as a European first.
Why it matters
For users, a quantum processor only becomes useful when it sits next to a supercomputer, with software to move work between the two. This is that plumbing being built, in a public infrastructure researchers and companies can actually access.
Key takeaways
- Three complementary quantum technologies in one national infrastructure: neutral atoms (Pasqal, Ruby), single photons (Quandela, Lucy) and cat qubits (Alice & Bob, Kity), described by GENCI as a European first.
- Ruby and Lucy have been inaugurated and put into service; Kity is to be connected to the Joliot-Curie supercomputer, hosted and operated by the CEA's TGCC.
- GENCI supported 2,400 scientific projects in 2025, 70 percent of them now involving AI, according to its development and technical directors, Sabine Mehr and Stéphane Requena, in IT Magazine (issue 1083, September 2026).
- On 17 September 2026, the CEA and Alice & Bob announced a partnership to integrate Alice & Bob's fault-tolerant software stack into the hybrid quantum-HPC infrastructure through Bull's Qaptiva platform, with a research programme on many-body problems targeting early fault-tolerant systems by 2030.
GENCI, the public agency that provides France's researchers with supercomputing, is turning its national infrastructure hybrid. At ISC 2026, it presented the quantum machines now part of that picture: Ruby, built by Pasqal on neutral atoms, and Lucy, built by Quandela on single photons, both inaugurated and in service, and Kity, acquired from Alice & Bob, whose cat qubits are designed for error correction. Kity is to be connected to the Joliot-Curie supercomputer, hosted and operated by the CEA's TGCC computing centre, which GENCI describes as the first of its kind in a European computing centre.
In an interview with IT Magazine (issue 1083, September 2026), relayed on LinkedIn by GENCI, its development director Sabine Mehr and technical director Stéphane Requena set the context: 2,400 scientific projects supported in 2025, 70 percent of them involving AI, and a sovereignty agenda that also runs through European chips and French AI accelerators. The quantum part is framed as an engineering problem of hybridisation: getting classical and quantum resources to work together in one workflow.
That is also the point of a partnership announced on 17 September 2026 by the CEA and Alice & Bob: Alice & Bob's software stack for fault-tolerant computing is to be integrated into the hybrid infrastructure through Bull's Qaptiva platform, which already interfaces with the Quandela and Pasqal machines, so that code written once can run on different quantum back ends. A joint research programme targets many-body problems in condensed matter, with realistic algorithms for early fault-tolerant systems by 2030 and applications in materials, chemistry and industrial simulation.
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