Conference Diary: FUZZ‑IEEE 2025 in Reims — Presenting my FPGA‑Based QAOA Work
- Amir Aliz
- Sep 17
- 2 min read
Date: 6–9 July 2025
Location: Reims Convention Centre, Reims, France
I attended FUZZ‑IEEE 2025 in Reims, France (6–9 July 2025) to present my PhD work on FPGA‑accelerated simulation of QAOA. It was a packed week of talks, demos, and hallway chats with the computational intelligence community. In this post I share my session notes, what I presented, key takeaways, and a short photo log from Reims.
My contribution
Paper title: Towards an Efficiently Simulated Quantum Approximate Optimisation Authors: Amir Alizadeh, Amir Pourabdollah, Ahmad Lotfi I presented a position paper outlining an FPGA‑centric QAOA simulator. The idea is to keep the simulation accurate for deep circuits but make it faster and more energy‑efficient than CPU/GPU‑only approaches by (1) precomputing and streaming cost‑Hamiltonian operations and (2) pipelining the mixer updates across on‑chip resources. The end goal is multi‑FPGA scaling (e.g., the Hydra cluster at NTU) to push QAOA simulations to larger qubit counts without
blowing up time or power.
Session notes & takeaways
Precision vs resources. There’s real interest in fixed‑ vs floating‑point trade‑offs for stability, BRAM, and DSP usage.
Memory bandwidth is king. Efficient streaming + tiling of the state vector often matters more than raw FLOPs.
Parallel kernels. Replicating independent mixer pair‑updates can line up with available DSP blocks to boost throughput.
Benchmarking matters. Agreed with several attendees to do an apples‑to‑apples comparison vs GPU backends at the same circuit depths and optimisers.
Collab leads. Met researchers working on hybrid fuzzy/quantum‑inspired heuristics—promising for joint experiments.
What’s next: finalise single‑FPGA benchmarks (throughput/latency), run scaling studies (qubits, depth p) with GPU comparisons, and prepare plots + a short methods note.
A few personal moments
Reims is compact and walkable. After sessions, I visited Notre‑Dame de Reims, strolled the Boulingrin market area, and caught golden‑hour shots near the city centre. Great food, even better conversations.
Thanks
Big thanks to the organisers and the IEEE CIS community, and to my supervisors Amir Pourabdollah and Ahmad Lotfi for continuous support. If you’re working on hardware‑accelerated quantum simulation or fuzzy‑quantum hybrids, let’s connect!
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