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D-Wave Systems Breaks the 1000 Qubit Quantum Computing Barrier
Monday, June 22, 2015Company Profile | Follow Company
New Milestone Will Enable System to Address Larger and More Complex Problems
Vancouver, BC, June 22, 2015--(T-Net)--D-Wave Systems Inc., the world's first quantum computing company, today announced that it has broken the 1000 qubit barrier, developing a processor about double the size of D-Wave's previous generation and far exceeding the number of qubits ever developed by D-Wave or any other quantum effort.
This is a major technological and scientific achievement that will allow significantly more complex computational problems to be solved than was possible on any previous quantum computer, according to the company.
D-Wave's quantum computer runs a quantum annealing algorithm to find the lowest points, corresponding to optimal or near optimal solutions, in a virtual “energy landscape.” Every additional qubit doubles the search space of the processor.
At 1000 qubits, the new processor considers 21000 possibilities simultaneously, a search space which dwarfs the 2512 possibilities available to the 512-qubit D-Wave Two. ?In fact, the new search space contains far more possibilities than there are ?particles in the observable universe.
“For the high-performance computing industry, the promise of quantum computing is very exciting. It offers the potential to solve important problems that either can't be solved today or would take an unreasonable amount of time to solve,” said Earl Joseph, IDC program vice president for HPC. “D-Wave is at the forefront of this space today with customers like NASA and Google, and this latest advancement will contribute significantly to the evolution of the Quantum Computing industry.”
As the only manufacturer of scalable quantum processors, D-Wave breaks new ground with every succeeding generation it develops. The new processors, comprising over 128,000 Josephson tunnel junctions, are believed to be the most complex superconductor integrated circuits ever successfully yielded.
They are fabricated in part at D-Wave's facilities in Palo Alto, CA and at Cypress Semiconductor's wafer foundry located in Bloomington, Minnesota.
“Temperature, noise, and precision all play a profound role in how well quantum processors solve problems. Beyond scaling up the technology by doubling the number of qubits, we also achieved key technology advances prioritized around their impact on performance,” said Jeremy Hilton, D-Wave vice president, processor development. “We expect to release benchmarking data that demonstrate new levels of performance later this year.”
The 1000-qubit milestone is the result of intensive research and development by D-Wave and reflects a triumph over a variety of design challenges aimed at enhancing performance and boosting solution quality. Beyond the much larger number of qubits, other significant innovations include:
“Breaking the 1000 qubit barrier marks the culmination of years of research and development by our scientists, engineers and manufacturing team,” said D-Wave CEO Vern Brownell. “It is a critical step toward bringing the promise of quantum computing to bear on some of the most challenging technical, commercial, scientific, and national defense problems that organizations face.”
A 1000 qubit processor will also be on display at the upcoming GEOINT conference in D-Wave's booth, #10076.
About D-Wave Systems
D-Wave, the world's first quantum computing company, is using the deepest insights of physics and computer science to achieve breakthrough approaches to computation to address some of the most complex challenges in science, business and government.
Our latest system, the D-Wave Two™ quantum computer, is a 512-qubit computing system. D-Wave's systems are used by major corporations, universities and government agencies such as Lockheed Martin, Google, NASA, Harvard and the University of Southern California.
D-Wave systems are designed to solve a broad class of difficult optimization problems that have information volumes and complexity that overwhelm the ability of conventional computers to derive accurate, timely and actionable knowledge. Quantum computing holds the promise of unlocking these computational bottlenecks to enable better understanding and create new insights into important problems for customers in defense and intelligence, web search, cancer research, bioinformatics and logistics, with a focus on machine learning, pattern analysis, and a whole host of difficult graph and number theory problems
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