The Laboratory for Digitalisation primarily focuses on the intersection between three research areas: Quantum Computing, Systems Engineering, and Software Engineering. Future computing systems will leverage non-classical algorithms, and their hardware and software architectures need to combine advantages of classical and quantum processing units. Consequently, scientific progress needs interdisciplinary thinking across fields now more than ever. The group seeks cross-cutting answers to highly topical scientific questions and participates in active transfer into applications.
We work towards quantum advantage on gate-based quantum computers and quantum annealers by designing integrated quantum algorithms, systems and software.
The Systems Architecture Research Group investigates modern architectures for embedded systems, with a strong focus on OSS components. Head: Dr.-Ing. Ralf Ramsauer
We further quantum and classical software engineering by mining quantitative insights using statistics and machine learning, with a particular focus on reproducibility.
New contribution to the CORE A* SIGMOD conference
We are delighted to share that our latest paper on quantum data management, driven by Manuel Schönberger, Immanuel Trummer, associate professor of computer science at Cornell University, and Wolfgang Mauerer, has been accepted at ACM SIGMOD 2026. Our work uncovers the potential of quantum(-inspired) annealing for large-scale multiple query optimisation, using problem partitioning and incremental optimisation techniques for efficient search space exploration.
Abstract
Multiple-query optimization (MQO) seeks to reduce redundant work across query batches. While MQO offers opportunities for dramatic performance improvements, the problem is NP-hard, limiting the sizes of problems that can be solved on generic hardware. We propose to leverage specialized hardware solvers for optimization, such as Fujitsu’s Digital Annealer (DA), to scale up MQO to problem sizes formerly out of reach.
We present a novel incremental processing approach that combines classical computation with DA acceleration. By efficiently partitioning MQO problems into sets of partial problems, and by applying a dynamic search steering strategy that reapplies initially discarded information to incrementally process individual problems, our method overcomes capacity limitations, and scales to extremely large MQO instances (up to 1,000 queries). A thorough and comprehensive empirical evaluation finds our method substantially outperforms existing approaches. Our generalisable framework lays the ground for other database use-cases on quantum-inspired hardware, and bridges towards future quantum accelerators.
Research Master student Benno Bielmeier successfully finished his thesis and continues his work in the team as doctoral student at the Systems Architecture Research Group. Congrats Benno! Congratulations also go to the two graduates Felix Wagner and Lukas Landgraf, who successfully presented their Bachelor's thesis.
The LfD presented their ongoing work at the Smart Country Convention in the capital of Germany, Berlin. The SCCON covers a broad range of topics, including smart cities and the digitalisation of public services. It is organized by Bitkom, the industry association of the German information and telecommunications sector, and patroned by the Federal Ministry of the Interior and Community.
At the LfD exhibition booth, in the immediate vicinity of the Bitkom stand, Benno Bielmeier presented our contributions to the Digital Innovation Ostbayern (DInO) and the AI Transfer Plus (KIT+) projects, while Tom Krüger, Hila Safi, Lukas Schmidbauer and Simon Thelen from the quantum team showcased our results in quantum computing as part of the TAQO-PAM and QLindA projects to many interested convention visitors. The positive response we received from various high-level business and public administration stakeholders confirmed to us that there is significant interest in AI and quantum computing in these fields.
The convention featured many industry leaders and high ranking politicians, such as Cem Özedmir, Federal Minister of Food and Agriculture, Volker Wissing, Federal Ministry for Digital and Transport, or Edgars Rinkēvičs, State President of Latvia. Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser said in her opening speech: "We have to keep up with technological progress and the expectations of society. To do this, we need a spirit of innovation and a willingness to reform". We at the Lab for Digitalisation could not agree more.
The partners of the TAQO-PAM project held their 6th cosortium meeting at Eviden in the beautiful city of Tübingen to exchange ideas and discuss the results of the last 6 months. Hila Safi, Maja Franz, Lukas Schmidbauer, Simon Thelen and Tom Krüger presented their latest results to the consortium.
Dr. Hans-Peter Nollert from the university of Tübingen gave a great talk on the origins of Eviden and on visualizations of special and general relativity. After some great food in the "Wurstküche", we went on a city tour as the final event of the day where we did not allow the rain to dampen our mood.
At this year's Linux Plumbers Conference, our PhD Student Benno Bielmeier gave a talk on his work on probabilistic real-time analyses and presented it to a broader audience. With his techniques, Benno tries to probabilistically predict real-time behaviour of complex software systems. His talk met high interest of Linux Kernel developers and ended in a fruitful discussion with core kernel developers. Congrats, Benno!
Abstract Ensuring temporal correctness of real-time systems is challenging. The level of difficulty is determined by the complexity of hardware, software, and their interaction. Real-time analysis on modern complex hardware platforms with modern complex software ecosystems, such as the Linux kernel with its userland, is hard or almost impossible with traditional methods like formal verification or real-time calculus. We need new techniques and methodologies to analyse real-time behaviour and validate real-time requirements.
In this talk, we present a toolkit designed to evaluate the probabilistic Worst-Case Execution Time (pWCET) of real-time Linux systems. It utilises a hybrid combination of traditional measurement-based and model-based techniques to derive execution time distributions considering variability and uncertainty in real-time tasks. This approach provides assessment of execution time bounds and supports engineers to achieve fast and robust temporal prediction of their real-time environments.
Our framework models runtime behaviour and predicts WCET in a streamlined four-phase process: (1) model relevant aspects of the system as finite automaton, (2) instrument the system and measure latencies within the model, (3) generate a stochastic model based on semi-Markov chains, and (4) calculate pWCET via extreme value statistics. This method is applicable across system context boundaries without being tied to specific platforms, infrastructure or tracing tools.
The framework requires injecting tracepoints to generate a lightweight sequence of timestamped events. This can be done by existing Linux tracing mechanisms, for instance, BPF or ftrace. Benefits include significantly reduced WCET measurement duration from days to minutes, dramatically accelerating development cycles for open-source systems with frequent code updates like Linux. This efficiency doesn't compromise accuracy; our hybrid approach ensures robust temporal predictions, enabling developers to quickly assess real-time implications of changes and maintain system performance.
In our talk, we outline the steps taken towards this new evaluation method and discuss the limitations and potential impacts on the development process. We invite interaction from the community to discuss the benefits and limitations of this approach. Our goal is to refine this toolkit to enhance its utility for Linux kernel developers and maintainers, ultimately contributing to a more efficient and effective development process for real-time systems.
For one final time, the QLindA consortium has met at OTH Regensburg, to review results and milestones achieved during the project's over three-year lifespan.
These milestones encompass a broad selection of publications on quantum machine learning for industrial applications, jointly organised workshops at the IEEE Conference on Quantum Computing and Engineering, and an extensive software library, among others.
Fitting to the occasion, a beer barrel was opened later in the evening, to properly celebrate the project's conclusion. Prost!
We are happy that all our full paper submissions to IEEE QCE, one of the leading quantum computing conferences, have been accepted:
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You want to contribute to ongoing research at the Laboratory for Digitalisation? Check out our list of Open Topics, or drop us an email, if you find none of the presented theses ideas interesting, or you have this one brilliant idea you want to pursue.
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