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quantum comp head

Over the past few years, quantum computer manufacturer D-Wave has been rolling out hardware capable of increasingly circuitous tasks and solving more advanced types of problems. This week, it unveiled a new system capable of entangling upwardly to ii,000 qubits.

The D-Wave 2000Q has two,048 qubits; a substantial increase over the 1,000-qubit D-Moving ridge 2X. Every bit of import, the $15 million-dollar computer has a first customer — Temporal Defense Systems, which will use the machine "to solve some of the most critical and complex cyber security problems impacting governments and commercial enterprises." The terms of the deal as well give TDS an upgrade path to future "QPUs" (quantum processing units, natch).

"The combined power of the TDS / D-Moving ridge breakthrough cyber solution will revolutionize secure communications, protect against insider threats, and assist in the identification of cyber adversaries and set on patterns," said James Burrell, TDS Principal Technology Officeholder and former FBI Deputy Banana Director. "Combining the unique computational capabilities of a quantum calculator with the most avant-garde cyber security technologies will deliver the highest level of security, focused on both prevention and attribution of cyber attacks."

There are considerable benefits associated with this arroyo and the evolution of unprecedented levels of detection and attribution, Burrell said. "The applied science will provide the ability to identify, authorize, and authenticate at the private device level throughout the network. Additionally, the introduction of postal service-quantum cryptography algorithms and the capability to solve complex computational problems achievable merely using quantum computing platforms will help in improving the security of constantly changing operational networks…the intent is to innovate an entirely new arroyo to existing and emerging cyber security challenges impacted by the book, sophistication, and complexity of modern assault methodologies."

D-Wave2000Q

This is i of those statements that sounds extremely impressive, just I'thousand a little less certain of how information technology volition work in practice. Historically, ane limit of D-Wave computers has been that they had trouble with certain classes of problems. D-Wave'south architecture uses breakthrough annealing and many of the early research projects into its systems focused on whether the device was performing quantum annealing or simply simulating information technology. D-Wave describes quantum annealing as:

Breakthrough annealing is fundamentally different from classical computing. It harnesses the natural tendency of existent-world breakthrough systems to find depression-energy states. If an optimization problem is analogous to a landscape of peaks and valleys, for instance, each coordinate represents a possible solution and its acme represents its energy. The all-time solution is that with the lowest energy corresponding to the lowest signal in the deepest valley in the mural.

Computation is performed by initializing the breakthrough processing unit (QPU) into a footing land of a known problem and annealing the system toward the problem to be solved such that it remains in a low energy state throughout the procedure. At the end of the computation, each qubit ends up equally either a 0 or 1. This final state is the optimal or nigh-optimal solution to the problem to be solved.

One interesting difference between the older D-Wave systems and the newer D-Wave 2X and 2000Q are how they bring together qubits together. Here'due south the sometime method:

Quantum-Sparse

And here'south the D-Wave 2X system (our understanding is the D-Wave 2000Q uses this same topology).

DW2X

The network is still sparsely connected, but it looks equally if there's significantly more cross-qubit connections than we saw in previous systems. This should brand it easier to utilize the D-Wave 2000Q to solve diverse types of problems, and hopefully give scientists more useful scenarios to evaluate the performance of quantum annealing versus its classical counterpart.