  The focus of this Visualization Viewpoints article is to provide some
background on Quantum Computing (QC), to explore ideas related to how
visualization helps in understanding QC, and examine how QC might be useful for
visualization with the growth and maturation of both technologies in the
future. In a quickly evolving technology landscape, QC is emerging as a
promising pathway to overcome the growth limits in classical computing. In some
cases, QC platforms offer the potential to vastly outperform the familiar
classical computer by solving problems more quickly or that may be intractable
on any known classical platform. As further performance gains for classical
computing platforms are limited by diminishing Moore's Law scaling, QC
platforms might be viewed as a potential successor to the current field of
exascale-class platforms. While present-day QC hardware platforms are still
limited in scale, the field of quantum computing is robust and rapidly
advancing in terms of hardware capabilities, software environments for
developing quantum algorithms, and educational programs for training the next
generation of scientists and engineers. After a brief introduction to QC
concepts, the focus of this article is to explore the interplay between the
fields of visualization and QC. First, visualization has played a role in QC by
providing the means to show representations of the quantum state of
single-qubits in superposition states and multiple-qubits in entangled states.
Second, there are a number of ways in which the field of visual data
exploration and analysis may potentially benefit from this disruptive new
technology though there are challenges going forward.
