BURNABY, B.C. — October 5, 2021 – Quantum computing systems and software company D-Wave Systems Inc. today said at its annual user conference, Qubits, it has released a performance update to its Advantage quantum system, a new hybrid solver in the company’s Leap quantum cloud service, and showed a preview of its next-generation quantum platform that will include both annealing and gate-model quantum computers.
The company said the Advantage performance update, a new quantum processing unit (QPU) available today in the Leap quantum cloud service, builds on the system’s 5000+ qubits and 15-way connectivity. The update also includes advancements that enable customers to solve larger and more complex problems with greater precision, finding better results 70 percent of the time on certain classes of problems, according to the company.
D-Wave unveiled the constrained quadratic model (CQM) solver – the newest addition to D-Wave’s family of quantum hybrid solvers in Leap. The CQM solver incorporates problem constraints into the solver, allowing users to benefit from a simplified expression of their constrained problems. This significantly expands the breadth and size of problems customers can solve with constraints, allowing enterprises to formulate even larger problems that run across classical and quantum systems and find the best answers to complex business problems.
D-Wave said its new roadmap, code-named Clarity, makes it the only quantum computing company to offer both annealing and gate-model quantum computers via an integrated, full stack quantum platform.
The roadmap incorporates:
- The next-generation Advantage 2 quantum system with a new qubit design that enables 20-way connectivity in a new topology, D-Wave said. The Advantage 2 QPU will contain 7000+ qubits and make use of the latest improvements in quantum coherence in a multi-layer fabrication stack, further harnessing the quantum mechanical power of the system for finding better solutions, faster.
- An initiative to develop the industry’s first scalable and practical error-corrected gate-model computing system.
- More powerful hybrid solvers that expand use cases and bring the best of quantum and classical resources together.
- Cross-platform open-source developer tools, enabling customers to invest in one tools platform and use across multiple quantum systems.
Quantum annealing is designed for optimization, both today and into the future. In fact, recent publications show that the classical processing overhead and lesser performance of gate-model systems on optimization problems make these systems ineffective on this class of problem (e.g. “Applying quantum algorithms to constraint satisfaction problems,”[1] “Noise-Induced Barren Plateaus in Variational Quantum Algorithms,”[2] and “Training variational quantum algorithms is NP-hard — even for logarithmically many qubits and free fermionic systems”[3]). D-Wave’s ongoing commitment to, and investment in, annealing quantum computing technology will continue to accelerate performance and expand the ability for customers to get better solutions to complex optimization problems.
While D-Wave’s ongoing focus on improving its quantum annealing technology will continue to bring value to users interested in optimization, this path will also unlock new annealing-based applications including broader materials science applications, 5G and wireless use cases, and training of machine learning models.
The company’s new gate-model quantum computing initiative is targeted at users who seek solutions for simulating quantum systems. By expanding into gate-model quantum systems, D-Wave’s quantum computing offerings will impact the lifecycles of industry: in pharmaceuticals, gate-model systems will assist with drug discovery, while annealing systems will ensure patient trial optimization, and in manufacturing, new meta materials will be designed with gate-model systems, while factory automation improvements will deliver those new products to market more efficiently using quantum annealing. To get there, Clarity places strong emphasis on solving for scalability and quantum processor architecture, both of which are key challenges to bringing a working gate-model technology to market and expanding the power of annealing quantum computing.
Enterprises, governments, and developers who get started with D-Wave’s Leap quantum cloud service today benefit from the Advantage performance update and CQM solver to build in-production hybrid quantum applications now. The Clarity roadmap includes dual-path hardware and cross-platform services, software, and tools for even more quantum use cases in the future. Customers want a flexible array of quantum solutions and expect that their quantum investments will make sound business sense today, while needing trusted solutions for the longer term. Common tools in familiar programming languages and approachable interfaces maintain ease-of-use in both getting started and expanding in-production quantum application portfolios.
The company said that by expanding its product portfolio to include annealing and gate-model systems, D-Wave is the first quantum computing company to meet this cross-platform customer need.
“D-Wave’s Advantage system has grown into a quantum technology that leads the world in the practice of computing using features of quantum mechanics. D-Wave has achieved this edge by wisely restricting its technology to the requirements of quantum annealing,” said Professor Doctor Kristel Michielsen, Group Leader, “Quantum Information Processing,” Forschungszentrum Jülich. “With its new initiative to engineer its first scalable and practical error-corrected gate-model quantum computing system, D-Wave is now expanding from this successful platform into the arena of general-purpose quantum computing. This fundamental step should enable D-Wave to cover the entire market of potential applications in the future and will make D-Wave an even more important partner for Jülich to work with on quantum research and to further advance practical quantum computing.”
“Customers want to be able to solve their hard problems using quantum computers. The delivery of a new Advantage performance update and quantum hybrid solver demonstrates our relentless focus on ongoing, on-time product delivery. And, we’ve taken what we’ve learned and built over the past 20 or so years and developed a quantum platform roadmap that will further the benefits of annealing quantum computing for optimization problems, while accelerating our ability to expand into other problem classes,” said Alan Baratz, CEO, D-Wave. “Clarity is what our customers have been asking for. Our full-stack approach to quantum technology, everything from chip fabrication to system development, and from hybrid software solvers to robust open-source developer tools, means that we’re the only company in the world that can both deliver on regular product innovations and bring a cross-platform stack to market quickly. That’s practical.”
[1] E. Campbell, A. Khurana, A. Montenaro, “Applying quantum algorithms to constraint satisfaction problems”, Quantum 3, 167 (2019).
[2] Wang et al., “Noise induced barren plateaus in variational quantum algorithms” (2021)
[3] M. Bittel and L. Kliesch, “Training variational quantum algorithms is NP-hard — even for logarithmically many qubits and free fermionic systems” (2021)
source: D-Wave
