Burnaby’s quantum computing company, D-Wave Systems Inc., has reached a first-of-its-kind milestone.
Earlier this week, D-Wave announced it had broken the 1,000-qubit barrier by developing a processor more than double the size of its 512-qubit (quantum bit) predecessor. To put it in perspective, other groups develop quantum computers around the 10-to 20-qubit level, according to Jeremy Hilton, D-Wave’s vice president of processor development.
The computers, which follow quantum mechanical theories, operate extremely quickly. They can process a huge volume of information in a short period of time and compute large amounts of variables for solving particular problems.
“When we look at a picture, we see the objects in the picture, like the people or the places. When a computer looks at a picture, it looks at the 10 million pixels,” Hilton explained. “If you want an algorithm to try to understand the picture in terms of the objects that are in it , that actually turns into something that’s much more difficult. Of that ocean of 10 million pixels, you have to figure out which ones are making up certain objects and what those objects are. That’s kind of extracting meaning from a whole bunch of data, and doing that well turns out to be a very difficult problem that classical computers struggle with at a large scale.”
What the new technology means for clients – like Google and NASA – is that researchers will now be able to ask “much harder questions” of a given amount of data.
Hilton added the new system will advance applications already in the works – from speech recognition to web search. For NASA, he said scientists will be able to better process the information they collect from stars in their search for other Earth-like planets. Another industry D-Wave is making inroads in is medicine, specifically using the quantum bit computers to help develop cancer treatments and therapies.
The computers are built using components that are primarily created – and invented – in shop. To be able to perform on the atomic level, the chips are kept in refrigerators at extremely cold temperatures, in a completely noiseless environment. How cold? About 150 times colder than interstellar space, Hilton told the NOW.
D-Wave has been around since 1999, when it launched as the world’s first commercial quantum computing company. It has more than 100 granted U.S. patents, with investors like In-Q-Tel (a not-for-profit venture capital firm that funds high-tech projects that may benefit the CIA and other intelligence organizations), Goldman Sachs and others. D-Wave sold its first computer to Lockheed Martin in 2010.
