Quantum Datacenter Intranet Advances

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Quantum Datacenter Intranet Advances

By R. Colin Johnson, Commissioned by CACM Staff, April 14, 2022

U.S., European Union, and Japanese researchers recently made advances that they say are necessary for future quantum datacenters, where millions of qubits will be interconnected with a quantum intranet (the private communications grid among separate quantum computers).

In particular, this year U.S. national lab-sponsored researchers have announced the capability to preserve the coherence of quantum superposition states for five seconds, "more than 500 times longer than last year's record," according to David Awschalom, principal investigator and senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Q-NEXT next-generation quantum research and science project, and Liew Family Professor in Molecular Engineering and Physics at the University of Chicago. During that five-second interval, as many as 100 million quantum operations and their intermediate results could be communicated over a quantum intranet, according to Awschalom.

Also this year, researchers at QuTech, a collaboration between Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and TNO, the Netherlands Organization for applied scientific research, demonstrated quantum gates with greater than 99.5% fidelity—the benchmark accuracy needed for quantum error correction, according to Lieven Vandersypen in the QuTech lab (the achievement was confirmed independently at the Riken Center for Emergent Matter Science in Saitama, Japan). "High-fidelity control of quantum bits is paramount for the reliable execution of quantum algorithms and for achieving fault tolerance," said Vandersypen. "Having surpassed the 99% barrier for two-qubit gate fidelity, semiconductor qubits are well positioned on the path to fault tolerance."

In addition, at the end of last year, IBM announced its 127-qubit Eagle quantum computer, to be followed by its 433-qubit Osprey model later this year, and next year by a 1,121-qubit Condor model, according to IBM senior vice president Dario Gil. "Eagle, Osprey, and Condor will truly let us explore uncharted computational territory. …By 2030, we predict that our quantum computer users will be running a trillion quantum circuits per day, each of which will be solving problems that cannot be solved today on traditional digital computers."   .....  '