Quantum Computing Management of a Cloud/Edge Architecture

Modern Cloud/Edge architectures are composed of computing nodes belonging to multiple layers, including Cloud facilities, Edge/Fog nodes and sensors/actuators. In this paper, we present an architecture that includes also quantum computing devices, in two ways: (i) quantum devices can become, in the next future, a viable alternative for executing computation that is intractable classically and (ii) they can be exploited to assist resource management and scheduling within the architecture itself. Furthermore, we describe the procedure through which a typical resource assignment problem, which has NP-hard complexity, can be transformed into a formulation that can be tackled by QAOA, a renowned hybrid quantum algorithm, and we present some preliminary results obtained for a simple instance, a knapsack problem where an Edge node needs to select and retrieve a set of processes from the Cloud.