King Bose
When a startup is named after a class of elementary subatomic particles called bosons — inspired by the great Indian mathematician and physicist Satyendra Nath Bose and his scientific legacy — you know its intentions are grandiose in scale.
BosonQ Psi, founded this year in Bhilai, Chhattisgarh, India, is an initiative that wants to ‘lead the paradigm shift in the marriage of quantum computing and multiphysics engineering simulations’.
Its four founders, Abhishek Chopra, Jash Minocha, Hassan Azmat and Rut Lineswala, all bring their unique skillsets that may make BosonQ Psi one of the most innovative QC startups on the Indian subcontinent and, with any luck, further afield.
We will develop world-class quantum computing software solutions including but not limited to computational fluid dynamics, computational structural dynamics, computational heat transfer, multidisciplinary optimization, computational aeroacoustics.
— BosonQ Psi
The potential that India has in the hard sciences is unfathomable — with a highly-educated workforce and huge population, it is a country that can make an impact in the emerging technologies market.
That American Dream
And it’s people like CEO and founder Abhishek Chopra that will make all the difference. With a B.S in aerospace, aeronautical and astronautical engineering from Rutgers — New Brunswick, he is currently doing a Ph.D. research at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, NY within the same focus area. His research, currently, is on high-fidelity CFD (code development and analysis), rotorcrafts, HPC, parallel computing, and aeroacoustics. While this may all seem quite a distance from the qubits, entanglement and superposition of quantum information science, Chopra’s story to where he is now is an interesting one:
“Aerospace engineering is something that has fascinated me since the 9th grade. I used to read a lot of research papers back then,” he said to TQD. “As the years passed by, I kept on stumbling into the term ‘CFD’ (computational fluid dynamics). I used to read a lot as it excited me but didn’t understand much. It challenged my knowledge at its fundamental level and I loved taking challenges, so I made it my goal to not only pursue studying it but also to pursue research on it.” This led to Chopra’s ‘Big American Dream’ from his roots in a small town in India.
He then found himself at the prestigious Rutgers on an undergraduate program. Later on a Ph.D. “At the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, my passion for CFD has grown tremendously, but I always wanted to utilize the power of the knowledge gifted to me to make a difference in people’s lives and I didn’t know how until this pandemic came along. Since the pandemic, life seems disruptive, but thanks to my parents — who have always supported me — the time is now.”
When TQD asked him about the connection between a passion for CFD and quantum computing, Chopra’s answer was insightful: “I had been looking in investing in something new and novel. That is when I became friends with quantum computing. Just like CFD, it challenged my core knowledge so I started taking some courses online. A couple of months passed by and my interest grew more in quantum computing. One day I was sitting with my mom and dad, and they asked me what was I doing — I said ‘waiting for my CFD simulation that’s running on a supercomputer’. My dad asked me how long the simulation on a supercomputer takes to finish? I answered him ‘months’. He didn’t find it appealing so asked me what else is new with technology and I said quantum computing. This conversation sparked within me a question — even with the current growth in supercomputing power, full and accurate aircraft simulation won’t be possible until 2050.”
Patriarch’s Questions
Big ideas come from small things, and it was there, at that moment, with Chopra’s father’s question to him, that the seeds of BosonQ Psi came to fruition.
According to Chopra and his team at the startup, supercomputers will reach their limits by 2030 by way of their consumption of electricity, which won’t be met — so what if I can make a quantum computer for conducting CFD simulation?
After Chopra’s father’s interrogation, could BosonQ Psi’s founder transform the aerospace industry in a time when it is under enormous pressure financially?
It seems he could.
“I spent the next few weeks looking if that’s possible and that idea soon became my life,” he began. “I called up my two best friends from Rutgers University. We’ve been brainstorming ideas since the day we met. We’ve teamed up on so many projects and have a lot of experience working with each other. With Hassan Azmat, our CBO, I shared my passion for sustainability and entrepreneurship and with Rut Lineswala, our CTO, I shared my passion for CFD,” Chopra added, “but it was Jash Minocha, our CFO — who happens to be my cousin — who gave me the final validation that this is definitely a promising idea and which we should think about making bigger. With their support, I decided to seed the idea of CFD with quantum computing into a startup venture — that’s how BosonQ Psi came into existence.”
And so it goes.
Storm Brewing
There will be, notwithstanding the COVID-19 shitstorm, troubles ahead for the aerospace industry, with a disruption in global travel by air to boot. BosonQ Psi’s quantum solution, however — via computational fluid dynamics — could solve some of the issues in the field of aerospace, automotive, power generation, chemical manufacturing, polymer processing, petroleum exploration, medical research, meteorology, and astrophysics by way of QC software solutions including, but not limited to, computational fluid dynamics, computational structural dynamics, computational heat transfer, multidisciplinary optimization, computational aeroacoustics.
We await the next chapter for this Indian startup.
