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D-Wave managed to make its way through the market by developing a quantum computer able to run on 2000 qubits. Even if universal quantum computers do not exist, the company struggled to occupy a place in the field. On January 24, the company founded 17 years ago has announced the launch of their fourth quantum chip able to support 2000 qubits. This is double compared to the 1000Q chip.
Another company known as the Burnaby, a British Columbia-based company, has its chips categorized in a particular class of quantum computing named quantum annealing. Annealing is used for a subset of enhancement computing issues. Optimization issues to which some were used to in school now scale up, serving as pillars for many other matters regarding radiotherapy, machine learning, and financial analysis.
Lockheed Martin, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NASA Ames, and Google represent all first customers of this company known as D-Wave. Some of these enterprises provide remote cloud access for computing. D-Wave is also bound to preserve their old tools in-house to use remote access. D-Wave provides an API which may be utilized with Matlab or Python.
Apparently, D-Wave represents the most commercialized company in the quantum computing space. Nevertheless, other enterprises like Y Combinator-based Rigetti Computing and Microsoft are prone to develop their own approaches. While Microsoft is trying to improve impossible topological computing, Rigetti is doing its best to implement a gate-based system.
Experts claim that these quantum computers are unique and purer, but this does not entail that annealing is of no use. In December 2015, Google published a study pointing out that to solve issues involving about 1000 binary variables, annealing is bound to surpass the performance of its classical counterpart.
Apparently, not everyone was thrilled when finding out about the new technology, but people are still interested in testing algorithms on the machines designed by D-Wave to search for new efficiencies. Developers argue that the 2000Q was not developed to perform better at all forms of computation.
The new technology does not promise to be the real quantum computer of the future, but it’s struggling to underline a particular market interest, similar to the benefits brought by GPUs. D-Wave will launch an open-source tool to help scientists resolve optimization issues at higher levels of abstraction.
Image source: flickr
