IBM Q

2021: Announcement of the roadmap for the development of quantum computers

In early February 2021, IBM presented a roadmap for the development of quantum computers. In accordance with the plans of the American corporation, in 2021 the capacity of such computing equipment will reach 100 qubits, and in 2022-2023 - 400 and 1000 qubits, respectively.

IBM Vice President of Quantum Ecosystem Development Bob Sutor said the company has a solid foundation to achieve these goals, including confidence in its scientific and engineering capabilities.

Roadmap for the development of quantum computers

We will be able to make a breakthrough: using small systems, we will get to larger ones, and they will help make quantum computing useful so that they perform tasks better than classical systems, "he said.

In 2021, IBM plans to release Qiskit runtime, a runtime environment that will allow you to run more processes and with greater performance. Bob Sutor argues that this solution will help accelerate computing operations 100 times for some applications.

The corporation adds that IBM's 100x acceleration of the runtime for all quantum computers in 2021 will allow you to perform calculations in just a few hours, which previously took several days.

The corporation intends in 2020 to make available to developers dynamic quantum circuits (quantum circuit - a sequence of instructions for execution), which will allow solving previously impossible problems on quantum computers.

By 2022, updated software, in particular the assembler language OpenQASM3, combined with the development of quantum computing technologies, will allow programmers to run dynamic circuits containing both classical and quantum instructions that are executed within the qubit coherence time. In 2023-2024, IBM will present libraries of ready-made quantum circuits for developers, the roadmap says.^[1]

2019

IBM's most powerful commercial quantum computer has become three times faster

On September 18, 2019, IBM announced an update to its most powerful commercial quantum computer. It has become almost three times faster: instead of less than 20 qubits, it has 53.

In addition, the company improved the design part of the chips and updated electronics to reduce the likelihood of data errors.

Since we began offering the very first quantum computer in the cloud in 2016, our strategy has been to take quantum computing outside of individual laboratory experiments conducted by several organizations and provide them to tens of thousands of users. We consistently increase capacity and improve the performance of our systems several times a year, "said IBM Research Director Dario Gil.

[IBM announces upgrade of its most powerful commercial quantum computer

The processing power of the 53-qubit system will be available to customers from mid-October 2019. It is part of IBM's new quantum computing center in New York. Five computers with a 20-qubit quantum chip will also be located there, and by November 2019 their number will increase to 14 pieces. IBM promises 95% availability of its quantum machines and double performance compared to the previous 20-qubit solutions created in 2018.

By September 18, 2019, about 80 companies (including JP Morgan Chase) and research institutes use IBM quantum computer resources. By this time, the equipment was used for more than 14 million experiments in various fields: from working with the chemical composition of batteries to the options market.

As for competitors, Google already has a 72-qubit device, but it does not allow outsiders to run programs on it. Other companies developing quantum computers, such as Rigetti Computing and Canadian D-Wave, have also launched their cloud services.^[2]

Q System One "personal" quantum computer

On January 8, 2019, it became known that IBM introduced the Q System One, a compact modular quantum computer, which the company's representatives themselves dubbed "an integrated universal quantum computing system developed for scientific and commercial applications." The system is a 20-qubit fourth-generation computing device enclosed in a sealed case in the form of a cube with a face of 2.75 m long, which is made of borosilicate glass 1.27 cm thick. In addition to the quantum processor, the Q System One package houses various control modules, as well as a cooling system.

The choice of housing material, according to Engadget, is justified by the simplicity of maintaining the temperature necessary for the device to function - about 10 millikelvins, that is, close enough to absolute zero. The design of the chassis allows you to protect the components of a quantum computer from undesirable vibrations that can lead to computational errors during its operation.

Despite the relative compactness of the model, IBM did not dare to demonstrate a full-size working prototype - instead, a version of the Q System One reduced to 2.25 m was presented with a missing rear panel, behind which cooling, power and control modules are hidden, as well as without a protective "cap," under which the quantum computer itself hides. However, according to Bob Sutor, vice president of IBM Research, IBM has a "fully operational" prototype of Q System One in Yorktown Heights (New York, USA), which as of January 2019 is already used in experiments.

The company also plans to open a quantum computing center in Pokeepsie (New York, USA) to work on an improved version of Q System One. The creators have not yet decided whether the Yorktown prototype will undergo processing or the product will be assembled from scratch. ^[3]]

2017

Engaging Samsung, Daimler and Honda to test quantum technology

On December 14, 2017, it became known that IBM chose 12 companies to test its quantum computer technology. As part of a program called Q Network, IBM, through the cloud, will provide partners with access to their computer with a capacity of 20 qubits (quantum bits).

According to Bloomberg, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Barclays, automakers Daimler and Honda Motor, South Korean technology giant Samsung Electronics, chemical companies JSR and Nagase, manufacturer of specialized alloys Hitachi Metals and others will be able to test the capabilities of IBM quantum computer. Among the tasks for which a quantum computer can be used is the creation of new chemical catalysts and the development of new materials with unusual properties.

IBM has selected 12 companies to test its quantum technology

The IBM quantum computer is theoretically capable of performing more than 1 million computing operations at a time. So far, this and other similar systems are inferior to traditional supercomputers, which can perform tens of thousands of trillion operations per second. In addition, quantum computers make errors during calculations, which can make the results unsuitable for practical application.

However, in the future, quantum computing systems will have to surpass supercomputers. By enabling partners to assess the capabilities of the new technology, IBM expects that in the future, when more powerful devices appear, companies will be ready to switch to it.

JPMorgan said they plan to take advantage of IBM's offer and study whether it is possible to use quantum computers to evaluate trading strategies, asset values ​ ​ and risk analysis.

Daimler noted that they want to investigate how quantum computers can help improve production processes, build routes for unmanned vehicles and develop new materials for the automotive industry.

Samsung promised to consider the use of quantum computers in semiconductor production, and JSR in chemical production.^[4]

The most powerful quantum computer

On November 10, 2017, at the IEEE Industry Summit (Washington, USA) conference on the future of computer technology, IBM announced the creation of a working prototype of a 50-qubit quantum computer, which thereby became the largest and most powerful in its class by the time of the announcement. It is planned that in the future the computing capabilities of a 50-qubit computer will become available from the cloud as part of the IBM Q project.

IBM cryostat connected to a 50-qubit system

In addition, IBM is going to provide users with access to a 20-qubit system in the cloud by the end of 2017, which will allow calculations with coherence of 90 microseconds (coherence is a property of qubits to be in several states at the same time). This time seems small, but it is a record for an industry where one of the biggest problems is maintaining the life of qubits.

As noted, IBM took six months to increase the coherence time for a 20-qubit processor - as a result, it was possible to double the indicator compared to 5- and 16-qubit models available to users. In 2018, work is planned on an additional modification of the 20-qubit version.

As University of Maryland professor Andrew Childs noted  to  the MIT Tech Review,  IBM  has not yet published details of its new quantum computer in a journal reviewed by experts in the field.

The IBM team  is fantastic, and it is clear that they take this seriously, but without seeing the details, it is difficult to comment, said Childs, adding that more qubits do not necessarily translate into a jump in computing ability, since these qubits can be noisy, and there may be problems with how well they are connected.[5]

A powerful quantum computer, similar to the one created by IBM, has very computational power when performing specific types of tasks. Such equipment can be useful in simulating chemical interactions at the subatomic level and other complex operations.

According to IBM, during the entire existence of the IBM Q project, 60 thousand users managed to use quantum computing in the cloud. In total, they conducted 1.7 million experiments, according to the results of which 35 research papers were published. The project registered users from 1.5 thousand universities, 300 high schools and 300 private institutes around the world.

We set world records for the pace of development of quantum computing technologies. But we must be sure that not only physicists have access to them, "said IBM quantum director Dario Gil.

According to Futurism,  IBM  has made significant strides in quantum computing since its researchers helped create a quantum information processing field. But IBM is not the only one involved in the race to create working quantum computers. Google and Intel are also developing their own quantum computing systems, the American startup Rigetti promises to revolutionize this area, and the Canadian company specializing in quantum computing, D-Wave, by November 2017 developed a pair of quantum computers that were used by NASA and Google.

Chemistry Research

IBM scientists compiled a mathematical model of the chemical molecule and calculated this model using a quantum computer at their disposal. The "heart" of this quantum computer is a processor with seven quantum bits, qubits, and the calculated model of the molecule is a model of the beryllium hydride molecule (BeH2), a model of the most complex molecule calculated on a quantum computer to date. This achievement is a demonstration of the possibility of using quantum computing systems for an in-depth study of processes and phenomena occurring during complex chemical reactions, which in the future can lead to a number of breakthroughs and achievements in the field of chemistry, materials science, medicine, etc.

"We expect that over the next few years, the capabilities of IBM Q quantum computing systems will far exceed the capabilities of even the most powerful modern supercomputers," says Dario Gil (Dario Gil), vice president of IBM Research, which oversees the development of artificial intelligence and quantum computing systems, "And these quantum computers will become an indispensable tool for research in areas such as chemistry, biology, healthcare and materials science."

Note that the capabilities of modern supercomputers are not yet enough to take into account all the subtleties of behavior and interaction of electrons in even the most complex molecules. And with an increase in the complexity of molecules, the requirements for the number of resources and computing power of computers increase exponentially and only quantum computers with a large number of qubits can cope with such tasks.

Announcement

In March 2017, IBM announced, according to the company, the world's first commercial quantum computing service. A program called IBM Q is launched in the IBM Cloud infrastructure.

IBM Q will provide consulting services and services similar to IBM Watson. Only in the case of a new project will not use traditional computers, but quantum ones.

IBM plans to create a quantum computer with about 50 qubits, which is 10 times more powerful than the system developed by the company by March 2017. A high-performance machine can perform tasks that ordinary PCs cannot cope with: for example, quickly look for new drugs and make scientific discoveries in a short time.

IBM launches world's first quantum computing service - IBM Q

A quantum computer with 50 qubits is enough to practically develop algorithms and solve important problems, says Scott Crowder, vice president and technical director of quantum computing at IBM Systems. Faster systems will help discover new methods for using quantum computers, which scientists had not previously suspected, he added.

The IBM Q program will allow you to take advantage of the great capabilities of quantum computing at the commercial level to solve practical problems from the field of science and business. Such computers, for example, will help in finding new molecular structures, optimizing logistics, financial modeling, developing artificial intelligence and protecting information.

In 2017, IBM will release the software tools necessary for the development of quantum applications. Developers will receive new APIs that help connect quantum computing with classical ones without deep knowledge in quantum physics.

By March 2017, IBM customers can use a 5-qubit quantum computer for free as a public cloud service. Its capabilities involved 40 thousand users in more than 200 thousand experiments and 15 research works, IBM said.^[6]

Notes