Quantum computing Wrapped
2021 is about to come to an end; let’s have a look at the recent advancements in Quantum computing thus far
If you are like me you would have seen these two words appear almost everywhere in the past decade “Quantum computing”, It’s been popping up in Movies, Tv shows, articles, and news headlines. It’s one of the most exciting emerging technology of the 21st Century, although there seems to be two schools of thought on the topic. Some believe quantum computing has” the potential to revolutionize computation by making certain types of classically intractable problems solvable”, and there’s the other side that thinks it’s all just hype that will fizzle out and will probably not make it past academic research. We will dive into the recent advancement in the past twelve months about the World of quantum computing, and we will let you decide for yourself what you think the future of Quantum computing is.
General Outline
- A Summary of Quantum Computing
- The Honeywell Quantum and Cambridge Quantum deal
- IBM
- China’s 66-Qubit 2D Quantum Computer
- Xanadu Quantum Technologies
- The expanding Quantum cloud as a service
- Conclusion
A Summary of Quantum Computing
What is Quantum computing?
Traditional computers are made up of billions of transistors that are turned on and off to represent a value, such as “1” or “0.” This method enables a traditional computer to store and process data in binary digits (known as “bits”). Quantum computers, on the other hand, use quantum bits, or Qubits, to process data. Qubits can be created in many alternative ways, like using superconducting electronic circuits, by trapping ionized atoms or by squeezing lights, i.e., (Photonic Quantum computing).
Due to the laws of quantum mechanics, Qubits can exist in more than one state — or ‘superposition’ — at exactly the same point in time.
This property allows qubits to both have a value of 1 or 0 or both of these numbers at the same time, therefore enabling quantum computers to process an exceedingly higher number of data possibilities than would be possible with a traditional computer.
Pairs of qubits can also become entangled; this means that the state of one Qubit can be tied to the state of another, which can be used to speed up quantum computing calculations. Indeed by leveraging “superposition” and “entanglement”, Quantum computers can have a computational advantage that can be used to solve some mathematical issues such as complex logistics optimizations and quantum molecular modeling that are impossible to perform using traditional computers.
The Honeywell Quantum and Cambridge Quantum deal
There has been an increasing pace of innovation happening at the forefront of the Quantum hardware or software frontier; there have also been mergers and acquisitions that are starting to occur, which is a clear indication of the maturing industry. For example, in June 2021, Honeywell Quantum Solutions announced that it would combine with Cambridge Quantum computing; this was a big deal because Honeywell is arguably the most significant player in trapped Ion Quantum computing Honeywell. In 2021 IBM claimed to have World’s highest performing quantum computer, therefore merging with Cambridge Quantum computing, another Quantum pioneer, was a significant move in the Quantum Computing World.
IBM
IBM has always been on the cutting edge of new emergent technologies, and Quantum computing is not any different, it’s always worth keeping an eye on IBM; the company now provides access to a fleet of quantum computers and offers its system one hardware to select clients who want their own on-site quantum computer. In September 2020, IBM also published its hardware roadmap, which indicates how it expects to scale up its current 27 and 65 cubic quantum processors to models with over 1000 qubits by mid-decade and towards a million by 2030.
In February 2021, IBM also published its roadmap for building an open quantum computing ecosystem. This is in the hopes of working with the open-source community and other pioneers, including the previously mentioned Cambridge Quantum computing, to make quantum hardware easily acceptable to traditional programmers. As IBM clarified on its plan for a frictionless quantum development future,
“Looking to 2025 and beyond, we think that our dream of frictionless quantum computing will become a reality — one where the hardware is no longer a concern to users or developers. By then, we envision that developers will rely upon on our advanced hardware with a cloud-based API and will include quantum computation as a natural component of their existing computational pipelines”. “We hope that by 2030, companies and users are running billions, if not a trillion quantum circuits a day, perhaps without even realizing that they are doing so.”
In May 2021, IBM demonstrated how it’s keeping up with its quantum roadmaps by releasing its new Qiskit runtimes software, Qiskit is IBM’s Quantum software development platform, and the new runtime variant executes in the IBM cloud rather than on the user’s machine and in close proximity to the quantum hardware it controls. This speeds up communication between classical computers that create and interpret quantum circuits and quantum algorithms and the quantum computers that execute them. Some quantum programs require thousands or millions of interactions between quantum and classical hardware, reducing classical to quantum system latency. IBM has subsequently demonstrated how Qiskit runtime can speed up quantum workloads by 120 times specifically, the process of modeling lithium hydride molecule been reduced from 45 days to 9 hours.
China’s 66-Qubit 2D Quantum Computer
As of August 2021, IBM most powerful computer had a 65 qubit superconducting processor called hummingbird; however, in June 2021, a team from the University of the science and technology of china revealed that they had built a 66 Qubit superconducting processor called “Zuchongzhi”.
In October 2019, the team at UST of China revealed that sample simulation benchmarks run on Zuchongzhi were two to three times faster than identical benchmarks run on Google’s sycamore quantum processor. This was crucial because when Google announced its findings, it claimed to have achieved Quantum supremacy or to have completed a task on a Quantum computer that could not be completed in a reasonable length of time on a classical computer.
Google’s claim of quantum supremacy was quickly disputed by IBM, not least because Quantum supremacy was originally characterized as a circumstance in which a quantum computer does something that a classical computer cannot. In this light, it’s worth mentioning that the Zuchongzhi sample benchmarks took around 1.2 hours to complete, compared to an estimated eight years on the World’s most powerful supercomputer. The Zuchongzhi team concluded after announcing their accomplishments.
Our works established an unambiguous quantum computational advantage.
Xanadu Quantum Technologies
IBM, Google, and China’s UST have all developed quantum processors based on using superconducting Qubits that have to be supercooled to near absolute zero. This imposes severe limitations on their future development, but alternate quantum computing technologies, particularly those based on photonic Qubits, have made tremendous progress in the last 12 months. For instance, Xanadu, a Canadian startup, launched a quantum computing service based on their photonic quantum processors in September 2020. These, like traditional microprocessors, function primarily through temperature and are also made of silicon.
Xanadu’s quantum chips are called X-Series chips and, they consist of mainly three primary modules, namely Squeezers(the input to the computer), the interferometer(the logical gates), and photon detectors(the measurement output). The Xanadu X-Series chips are especially for solving complex problems in the domain of Graph theory that are relevant for Finance, chemistry, and Logistics and are available on the Xanadu Quantum cloud. Click here for a more in-depth explanation of how the Xanadu Quantum chips work.
In May 2021, Xanadu raised an additional 100 million dollars of funding, and in July 2021, it was also awarded the Darpa grant to progress its work further. Xanadu also developed a Quantum neural network called Penny lane used for Quantum machine learning and another named strawberry fields, a cross-platform Python library for executing photonic quantum algorithms directly on Xanadu’s next-generation quantum hardware. It had built-in tools to simulate, compile, and submit jobs to its growing range of quantum photonic processors. Other pioneers working on the Photonic quantum computers include PSI Quantum, which has set a goal to build one million cubit photonic quantum computers. In May 2021, the company announced that it had developed the capability to manufacture silicon photonic chips; it is in the development with its manufacturing partner Globalfoundries(GF) to bring up its Q1 system: an integrated, silicon photonics-based quantum system. In July 2021, PsiQuantum also closed a $450 million funding round, so it seems that interest is rising rapidly in the development of quantum computers that process data using light.
The expanding Quantum cloud as a service
One major factor pushing Quantum computing forward is the availability of Quantum hardware that can be accessed over the internet from the cloud. In May 2016, IBM became the first company to make Quantum computers available over the web, and currently, IBM provides online hardware to twenty different Quantum systems. In addition, other pioneers have provided “Qcaas” including Alibaba, Google, Rigetti, Xanadu, Oxford quantum circuits, D-wave systems that offer a Quantum cloud platform called LEAP, as well as Amazon and Microsoft. Both Microsoft’s Azure Quantum and Amazon Braket Quantum web services work by facilitating access to Online Quantum hardware provided by their Partners. There has been a lot of partnership and collaboration in the Growing Quantum computing community and embryonic marketplace, and it’s a positive thing for a growing industry to see that currently, Knowledge, expertise, and hardware are widely shared among the members of the Quantum Computing ecosystem.
Conclusion
It’s is indeed clear now that Quantum Computing has continued to advance, and over the last five years, we’ve seen very significant progress that suggests that at the end of the 2020s, Quantum computing might be a commercial reality. This does not indicate that Quantum computers will replace traditional ones; instead, they will be used in conjunction with classical hardware, and this is a future worth looking forward to.
Additional Resources
Some Major Events in Quantum computing were not covered in this article to avoid it being extremely lengthy. You can check out this article to see some of the events not covered above. Also, to see how you can directly apply Quantum machine learning to your projects. Check out this fantastic video by Jordan Harrod.
References:
Various sources which were quotes was used in the development of this article and are listed below for your further research.
