Tag Archives: Universities Space Research Association (USRA)

Google announces research results after testing 1,097-qubit D-Wave 2X™ quantum computers

1 Reply

If you’ve been reading this blog over the last few months, you’ll know that I’ve mentioned D-Wave Systems, a Vancouver (Canada)-based quantum computing company, frequently. The company seems to be signing all kinds of deals lately including one with Google (my Oct. 5, 2015 posting). Well, a Dec. 9, 2015 news item on Nanotechnology Now sheds more light on how Google is using D-Wave’s quantum computers,

Harris & Harris Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: TINY), an investor in transformative companies enabled by disruptive science, notes that yesterday [Dec. 8, 2015] NASA, Google and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) hosted a tour of the jointly run Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory located at the NASA’s Ames Research Center which houses one of D-Wave’s 1,097-qubit D-Wave 2X™ quantum computers. At this event, Google announced that D-Wave’s quantum computer was able to find solutions to complicated problems of nearly 1,000 variables up to 108 (100,000,000) times faster than classical computers.

A Dec. 8, 2015 posting by Hartmut Neven for the Google Research blog describes the research and the results (Note: Links have been removed),

During the last two years, the Google Quantum AI [artificial intelligence] team has made progress in understanding the physics governing quantum annealers. We recently applied these new insights to construct proof-of-principle optimization problems and programmed these into the D-Wave 2X quantum annealer that Google operates jointly with NASA. The problems were designed to demonstrate that quantum annealing can offer runtime advantages for hard optimization problems characterized by rugged energy landscapes. We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 108 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core. We also compared the quantum hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes as high as 108.

For anyone (like me) who needs an explanation of quantum annealing, there’s this from its Wikipedia entry (Note: Links have been removed),

Quantum annealing (QA) is a metaheuristic for finding the global minimum of a given objective function over a given set of candidate solutions (candidate states), by a process using quantum fluctuations. Quantum annealing is used mainly for problems where the search space is discrete (combinatorial optimization problems) with many local minima; such as finding the ground state of a spin glass.[1] It was formulated in its present form by T. Kadowaki and H. Nishimori in “Quantum annealing in the transverse Ising model”[2] though a proposal in a different form had been proposed by A. B. Finilla, M. A. Gomez, C. Sebenik and J. D. Doll, in “Quantum annealing: A new method for minimizing multidimensional functions”.[3]

Not as helpful as I’d hoped but sometimes its necessary to learn a new vocabulary and a new set of basic principles, which takes time and requires the ability to ‘not know’ and/or ‘not understand’ until one day, you do.

In the meantime, here’s more possibly befuddling information from the researchers in the form of a paper on arXiv.org,

What is the Computational Value of Finite Range Tunneling? by Vasil S. Denchev, Sergio Boixo, Sergei V. Isakov, Nan Ding, Ryan Babbush, Vadim Smelyanskiy, John Martinis, Hartmut Neven. http://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02206

This paper is open access.

US Los Alamos National Laboratory catches the D-Wave (buys a 1000+ Qubit quantum computer from D-Wave)

Leave a reply

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.”

…

“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.

D-Wave upgrades Google’s quantum computing capabilities

Leave a reply

Vancouver-based (more accurately, Burnaby-based) D-Wave systems has scored a coup as key customers have upgraded from a 512-qubit system to a system with over 1,000 qubits. (The technical breakthrough and concomitant interest from the business community was mentioned here in a June 26, 2015 posting.) As for the latest business breakthrough, here’s more from a Sept. 28, 2015 D-Wave press release,

D-Wave Systems Inc., the world’s first quantum computing company, announced that it has entered into a new agreement covering the installation of a succession of D-Wave systems located at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. This agreement supports collaboration among Google, NASA and USRA (Universities Space Research Association) that is dedicated to studying how quantum computing can advance artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the solution of difficult optimization problems. The new agreement enables Google and its partners to keep their D-Wave system at the state-of-the-art for up to seven years, with new generations of D-Wave systems to be installed at NASA Ames as they become available.

“The new agreement is the largest order in D-Wave’s history, and indicative of the importance of quantum computing in its evolution toward solving problems that are difficult for even the largest supercomputers,” said D-Wave CEO Vern Brownell. “We highly value the commitment that our partners have made to D-Wave and our technology, and are excited about the potential use of our systems for machine learning and complex optimization problems.”

Cade Wetz’s Sept. 28, 2015 article for Wired magazine provides some interesting observations about D-Wave computers along with some explanations of quantum computing (Note: Links have been removed),

Though the D-Wave machine is less powerful than many scientists hope quantum computers will one day be, the leap to 1000 qubits represents an exponential improvement in what the machine is capable of. What is it capable of? Google and its partners are still trying to figure that out. But Google has said it’s confident there are situations where the D-Wave can outperform today’s non-quantum machines, and scientists at the University of Southern California [USC] have published research suggesting that the D-Wave exhibits behavior beyond classical physics.

…

A quantum computer operates according to the principles of quantum mechanics, the physics of very small things, such as electrons and photons. In a classical computer, a transistor stores a single “bit” of information. If the transistor is “on,” it holds a 1, and if it’s “off,” it holds a 0. But in quantum computer, thanks to what’s called the superposition principle, information is held in a quantum system that can exist in two states at the same time. This “qubit” can store a 0 and 1 simultaneously.

Two qubits, then, can hold four values at any given time (00, 01, 10, and 11). And as you keep increasing the number of qubits, you exponentially increase the power of the system. The problem is that building a qubit is a extreme difficult thing. If you read information from a quantum system, it “decoheres.” Basically, it turns into a classical bit that houses only a single value.

D-Wave claims to have a found a solution to the decoherence problem and that appears to be borne out by the USC researchers. Still, it isn’t a general quantum computer (from Wetz’s article),

… researchers at USC say that the system appears to display a phenomenon called “quantum annealing” that suggests it’s truly operating in the quantum realm. Regardless, the D-Wave is not a general quantum computer—that is, it’s not a computer for just any task. But D-Wave says the machine is well-suited to “optimization” problems, where you’re facing many, many different ways forward and must pick the best option, and to machine learning, where computers teach themselves tasks by analyzing large amount of data.

It takes a lot of innovation before you make big strides forward and I think D-Wave is to be congratulated on producing what is to my knowledge the only commercially available form of quantum computing of any sort in the world.

ETA Oct. 6, 2015* at 1230 hours PST: Minutes after publishing about D-Wave I came across this item (h/t Quirks & Quarks twitter) about Australian researchers and their quantum computing breakthrough. From an Oct. 6, 2015 article by Hannah Francis for the Sydney (Australia) Morning Herald,

For decades scientists have been trying to turn quantum computing — which allows for multiple calculations to happen at once, making it immeasurably faster than standard computing — into a practical reality rather than a moonshot theory. Until now, they have largely relied on “exotic” materials to construct quantum computers, making them unsuitable for commercial production.

But researchers at the University of New South Wales have patented a new design, published in the scientific journal Nature on Tuesday, created specifically with computer industry manufacturing standards in mind and using affordable silicon, which is found in regular computer chips like those we use every day in smartphones or tablets.

…

“Our team at UNSW has just cleared a major hurdle to making quantum computing a reality,” the director of the university’s Australian National Fabrication Facility, Andrew Dzurak, the project’s leader, said.

“As well as demonstrating the first quantum logic gate in silicon, we’ve also designed and patented a way to scale this technology to millions of qubits using standard industrial manufacturing techniques to build the world’s first quantum processor chip.”

According to the article, the university is looking for industrial partners to help them exploit this breakthrough. Fisher’s article features an embedded video, as well as, more detail.

*It was Oct. 6, 2015 in Australia but Oct. 5, 2015 my side of the international date line.

ETA Oct. 6, 2015 (my side of the international date line): An Oct. 5, 2015 University of New South Wales news release on EurekAlert provides additional details.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

A two-qubit logic gate in silicon by M. Veldhorst, C. H. Yang, J. C. C. Hwang, W. Huang,    J. P. Dehollain, J. T. Muhonen, S. Simmons, A. Laucht, F. E. Hudson, K. M. Itoh, A. Morello    & A. S. Dzurak. Nature (2015 doi:10.1038/nature15263 Published online 05 October 2015

This paper is behind a paywall.

More investment money for Canada’s D-Wave Systems (quantum computing)

Leave a reply

A Feb. 2, 2015 news item on Nanotechnology Now features D-Wave Systems (located in the Vancouver region, Canada) and its recent funding bonanza of $28M dollars,

Harris & Harris Group, Inc. (Nasdaq:TINY), an investor in transformative companies enabled by disruptive science, notes the announcement by portfolio company, D-Wave Systems, Inc., that it has closed $29 million (CAD) in funding from a large institutional investor, among others. This funding will be used to accelerate development of D-Wave’s quantum hardware and software and expand the software application ecosystem. This investment brings total funding in D-Wave to $174 million (CAD), with approximately $62 million (CAD) raised in 2014. Harris & Harris Group’s total investment in D-Wave is approximately $5.8 million (USD). D-Wave’s announcement also includes highlights of 2014, a year of strong growth and advancement for D-Wave.

A Jan. 29, 2015 D-Wave news release provides more details about the new investment and D-Wave’s 2014 triumphs,

D-Wave Systems Inc., the world’s first quantum computing company, today announced that it has closed $29 million in funding from a large institutional investor, among others. This funding will be used to accelerate development of D-Wave’s quantum hardware and software and expand the software application ecosystem. This investment brings total funding in D-Wave to $174 million (CAD), with approximately $62 million raised in 2014.

“The investment is a testament to the progress D-Wave continues to make as the leader in quantum computing systems,” said Vern Brownell, CEO of D-Wave. “The funding we received in 2014 will advance our quantum hardware and software development, as well as our work on leading edge applications of our systems. By making quantum computing available to more organizations, we’re driving our goal of finding solutions to the most complex optimization and machine learning applications in national defense, computing, research and finance.”

The funding follows a year of strong growth and advancement for D-Wave. Highlights include:

•    Significant progress made towards the release of the next D-Wave quantum system featuring a 1000 qubit processor, which is currently undergoing testing in D-Wave’s labs.
•    The company’s patent portfolio grew to over 150 issued patents worldwide, with 11 new U.S. patents being granted in 2014, covering aspects of D-Wave’s processor technology, systems and techniques for solving computational problems using D-Wave’s technology.
•    D-Wave Professional Services launched, providing quantum computing experts to collaborate directly with customers, and deliver training classes on the usage and programming of the D-Wave system to a number of national laboratories, businesses and universities.
•    Partnerships were established with DNA-SEQ and 1QBit, companies that are developing quantum software applications in the spheres of medicine and finance, respectively.
•    Research throughout the year continued to validate D-Wave’s work, including a study showing further evidence of quantum entanglement by D-Wave and USC  [University of Southern California] scientists, published in Physical Review X this past May.

Since 2011, some of the most prestigious organizations in the world, including Lockheed Martin, NASA, Google, USC and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA), have partnered with D-Wave to use their quantum computing systems. In 2015, these partners will continue to work with the D-Wave computer, conducting pioneering research in machine learning, optimization, and space exploration.

D-Wave, which already employs over 120 people, plans to expand hiring with the additional funding. Key areas of growth include research, processor and systems development and software engineering.

Harris & Harris Group offers a description of D-Wave which mentions nanotechnology and hosts a couple of explanatory videos,

D-Wave Systems develops an adiabatic quantum computer (QC).

Status
Privately Held

The Market
Electronics – High Performance Computing

The Problem
Traditional or “classical computers” are constrained by the sequential character of data processing that makes the solving of non-polynomial (NP)-hard problems difficult or potentially impossible in reasonable timeframes. These types of computationally intense problems are commonly observed in software verifications, scheduling and logistics planning, integer programming, bioinformatics and financial portfolio optimization.

D-Wave’s Solution
D-Wave develops quantum computers that are capable of processing data quantum mechanical properties of matter. This leverage of quantum mechanics enables the identification of solutions to some non-polynomial (NP)-hard problems in a reasonable timeframe, instead of the exponential time needed for any classical digital computer. D-Wave sold and installed its first quantum computing system to a commercial customer in 2011.

Nanotechnology Factor
To function properly, D-wave processor requires tight control and manipulation of quantum mechanical phenomena. This control and manipulation is achieved by creating integrated circuits based on Josephson Junctions and other superconducting circuitry. By picking superconductors, D-wave managed to combine quantum mechanical behavior with macroscopic dimensions needed for hi-yield design and manufacturing.

It seems D-Wave has made some research and funding strides since I last wrote about the company in a Jan. 19, 2012 posting, although there is no mention of quantum computer sales.