Acra’s career spans over three decades of technology and innovation leadership, including the era of scale-out distributed computing.
Cambridge, UK and Los Angeles, CA - 29th October, 2024: Nu Quantum, the quantum entanglement startup, is today announcing that Roland Acra has joined as a Board Advisor. Acra’s career spans over three decades of technology and innovation leadership, mainly focusing on networking and data centre technological innovation and business growth, including into the era of scale-out distributed computing. In the mid 2010s, he was head of Cisco’s $10B/year data centre division building out hardware and software capabilities and growth. He also led the launch of new software products which under his leadership generated over $100M yearly within three years of launch. Roland went on to become the Chief Technology Officer of Cisco from 2019 - 2022, where he led technology strategy and explored frontier technologies, including quantum computing. After leaving Cisco he joined Psi Quantum as Chief Business Officer, and now has been appointed as an Advisor to the Board of Nu Quantum, which he believes is building the infrastructure for true quantum network-based scale-out in a similar fashion to classical computing.
Roland Acra, Board Advisor at Nu Quantum, said:
“There's a very striking parallel with classical computing and data centre transformation with what's going on in the quantum space in terms of networking based scale-out. You can see strong analogs between network interface cards (NICs) in classical computing and the QPI or Qubit Photon Interface that Nu Quantum is developing - connecting the computing resource to the network. Nu Quantum’s QNUs, or Quantum Networking Units, are the equivalent of high performance switches that aggregate distributed computing resources. And Nu Quantum’s overall entanglement fabric will offer a seamless hardware abstraction to quantum algorithms, similarly to how distributed computing frameworks such as Hadoop, Spark, or Nvidia’s CUDA have enabled scale-out paradigms for Big Data or AI application developers.
“Looking back at how data centre computing has evolved, we can see how it led to an uncontested preference for the better performance of a scale-out approach over a scale-up approach. The scale-up approach in computing classically was to build the biggest mainframe, or the biggest supercomputer. But these are dwarfed by, at least for most workloads, the network-enabled aggregation of a large number of standalone servers using more standard CPU or GPU technology. The huge performance numbers, rapid evolution from frequent iteration, and high efficiency come from the ability to coherently interconnect them with a software fabric and that's what's called scale-out, meaning you have a bunch of servers holding hands, but woven together with clever orchestration frameworks so that you can lay on them very large computing or AI jobs.
“I am excited to work with Nu Quantum because it sits in a pivotal position of enabling scale-out quantum computing. Scale-out classical computing has been a huge accelerator of exciting Big Data and AI driven applications. If we pull it off in quantum, we have the potential to bring in the horizon of useful, fault-tolerant quantum computing by several years. That's a big deal when considering concrete commercial impact.”
Dr. Carmen Palacios-Berraquero, Founder and CEO at Nu Quantum, said:
“Having Roland’s experience and insight into the scale-out of classical data centres will prove incredibly valuable for us in the next phase of our growth. He has already provided valuable advice and connections and we’re proud he has decided to join us.”
