Knime for Quantum Computing

KNIME Analytics Platform
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Hi Together,

I have the opportunity to experiment with a Quantum Computer. I would like to transfer Knime workflows created to run on the KBH or in KAP to the QC. As every conventional algorithm has to be recoded for quantum, I would like to ask, is there already a QC recoding solution for Knime workflow available? Does anyone has an idea to this topic?

Thank you very much in advance,

Armin

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Hi @Armin_Alois , I would suspect that there is unlikely to have been much (if any) work done in this area. KNIME workflows aren’t your typical use case for the kind of challenges that QC is expected to be able to solve.

QC’s strength would be in solving n-hard (computationally extremely intensive) problems, whereas a KNIME workflow’s main bottlenecks are generally quantity of data being processed: Data transfer/disk IO/memory IO, reading from a database or parsing a csv file are unlikely to be made faster by using a Quantum Computer.

I suspect you would be better trying to find a specific algorithm that currently takes a long time and look to recode that, but coding for QC is (I would imagine) unlikely to be anything like coding for classical algorithms, and probably not something I’m ever likely to go near. (So I’m actually a little envious that you’ll get to have a play :wink: )

I am not trying to be flippant, but I put your question to chatGPT to clarify my understanding of the current state of QC, pointing out that KNIME runs on Windows, MacOS and Linux…

It’s response:

KNIME isn’t some neat little algorithm you can slip into a quantum circuit. It’s a whole software stack:

  • written in Java,

  • running on top of the JVM,

  • relying on operating system services (files, memory, networking),

  • and assuming a conventional CPU/OS underneath.

Quantum computers don’t run Windows, macOS, or Linux. They’re controlled by classical machines through special SDKs (like Qiskit, PennyLane, Cirq). The QC itself only executes quantum circuits — basically sequences of reversible gates on qubits. It doesn’t have a file system, a JVM, or anything that looks like a normal OS.

So “just porting KNIME to a QC” is like saying “let’s run Photoshop on an abacus”. You can’t. At best, you could:

  1. Run KNIME on your normal laptop/server.

  2. Identify one very specific task in a workflow (say, optimisation).

  3. Offload just that step to a quantum backend via Python/Java integration.

  4. Pull the result back into the workflow.

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Thank you very much Brian.

I have definitely some Python Script nodes with scripts requiring heavy computation loads. So I will focus on those.

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I would be interested to hear of your experiences. I haven’t the first clue about coding for a QC.

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I hope I can share something substantial in some time. Thank you very much for responding to my post.

1 Like