It can be euphoric experience making a major technical breakthrough (June 2015), selling to a new large customer (Nov. 2015) and impressing your important customers so they upgrade to the new system (Oct. 2015) within a few short months.* D-Wave Systems (a Vancouver-based quantum computer company) certainly has cause to experience it given the events of the last six weeks or so. Yesterday, in a Nov. 11, 2015, D-Wave news release, the company trumpeted its sale of a 1000+ Qubit system (Note: Links have been removed),
D-Wave Systems Inc., the world’s first quantum computing company, announced that Los Alamos National Laboratory will acquire and install the latest D-Wave quantum computer, the 1000+ qubit D-Wave 2X™ system. Los Alamos, a multidisciplinary research institution engaged in strategic science on behalf of national security, will lead a collaboration within the Department of Energy and with select university partners to explore the capabilities and applications of quantum annealing technology, consistent with the goals of the government-wide National Strategic Computing Initiative. The National Strategic Computing Initiative, created by executive order of President Obama in late July [2015], is intended “to maximize [the] benefits of high-performance computing (HPC) research, development, and deployment.”
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“Los Alamos is a global leader in high performance computing and a pioneer in the application of new architectures to solve critical problems related to national security, energy, the environment, materials, health and earth science,” said Robert “Bo” Ewald, president of D-Wave U.S. “As we work jointly with scientists and engineers at Los Alamos we expect to be able to accelerate the pace of quantum software development to advance the state of algorithms, applications and software tools for quantum computing.”
A Nov. 11, 2015 news item on Nanotechnology Now is written from the company’s venture capitalist’s perspective,
Harris & Harris Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:TINY), an investor in transformative companies enabled by disruptive science, notes that its portfolio company, D-Wave Systems, Inc., announced that Los Alamos National Laboratory will acquire and install the latest D-Wave quantum computer, the 1000+ qubit D-Wave 2X™ system.
The news about the Los Alamos sale comes only weeks after D-Wave announced renewed agreements with Google, NASA (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration), and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) in the aftermath of a technical breakthrough. See my Oct. 5, 2015 posting for more details about the agreements, the type of quantum computer D-Wave sells, and news of interesting and related research in Australia. Cracking the 512 qubit barrier also occasioned a posting here (June 26, 2015) where I described the breakthrough, the company, and included excerpts from an Economist article which mentioned D-Wave in its review of research in the field of quantum computing.
Congratulations to D-Wave!
*’It can be euphoric selling to your first large and/or important customers and D-Wave Systems (a Vancouver-based quantum computer company) certainly has cause to experience it. ‘ changed to more accurately express my thoughts to ‘It can be euphoric experience making a major technical breakthrough (June 2015), selling to a new large customer (Nov. 2015) and impressing your important customers so they upgrade to the new system (Oct. 2015) within a few short months.’ on Nov. 12, 2015 at 1025 hours PST.