Canadian company joins IBM and Rigetti in offering online access to pricey hardware
Quantum computing could someday supercharge artificial intelligence, accelerate drug discovery, and even reduce traffic jams. But existing quantum computers, which have only a modest, if any, advantage over their classical brethren, are expensive, finicky beasts. Even if you could afford the US $15 million to buy a D-Wave 2000Q quantum annealer [PDF], for example, you would need experts to maintain the ultracold operating conditions its processor requires.
Until today, that is, when Canadian startup D-Wave Systems Inc. launched a real-time online quantum computing environment called Leap. Leap is the latest addition to the quantum cloud—services that virtualize quantum computing for almost anyone with a computer and a broadband connection to use.
Leap allows anyone to sign up, giving them one minute of time on a cloud-connected 2000Q each month. That might not sound like much, but a key advantage of quantum computing is to be able to solve in milliseconds problems like factoring large numbers, optimizing routes, or calculating molecular structures that could take traditional computers days or weeks. Quantum computers encode information in qubits, enabling massively parallel computation relying on purely quantum effects.
“We want to enable hundreds of thousands or millions of developers to gain access to quantum computing technology, to understand it, and to develop applications,” says Murray Thom, D-Wave’s director of software and cloud services.
As well as granting access to a 2000Q computer housed at D-Wave’s headquarters in the Vancouver suburbs, Leap provides documentation, videos, training materials, and a community for the majority of developers who have never worked with a quantum computing device.
“There are a few people in materials simulation, finance, and machine learning who will understand quantum programming constructs in two or three sentences,” says Thom. “But the focus of our system is on folks who are new to quantum.”......MORE
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