Quantum Computers Compared

Useful, see link to full article linked to below there are 24 processors!

 Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Los Alamos National Laboratory compared leading quantum computers using the Quantum Computing User Program at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

The researchers reviewed 24 quantum processors and ranked their performance numbers against those from vendors like IBM and Quantinuum.

They used as a metric quantum volume, which estimates the degree to which a quantum processor can perform a specific type of random complex quantum circuit.

Outcomes indicated most processors performed close to promoted quantum volume, but rarely at the top numbers vendors touted.

The researchers found higher quantum performance tended to correspond with more intensive quantum circuit compilation, in which classical programming elements are translated into quantum computer commands.

From Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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China Ships First Quantum Computer

China moves forward with Commercial Quantum Computing

China’s Origin Quantum Ships First Quantum Computer

By Matt Swayne  in QuantumInsider ... 

Origin Quantum, a Chinese quantum computer startup, sold its first device, making China the third country to have a commercial quantum computer enterprise, according to several media outlets.

According to the South China Morning Post, state media reported that the company  sold its 24-qubit Wuyuan quantum computer to an unnamed customer about a year ago. The Wuyuan is based on a superconducting chip design.

Company officials label the Wuyuan as the country’s first “practical quantum computer.” It is not considered the first quantum computer built in China, but rather the first one developed for commercial uses. Prior quantum computers in China have been housed for academic uses and are among the devices that set records in delivering solutions far faster than classical computers, often referred to as quantum supremacy.

Because the Wuyuan sale is over a year old, it’s almost certain that Origin has more advanced versions of its system ready for commercial use. The company indicates that the next system, named Wukong, will be available soon.

The SCMP reported that Guo Guoping expects real-world benefits from its quantum computers within three to five years.

Last summer, the Hefei, China-based company closed a 1 billion yuan — or $148 million U.S. — Series B funding round.

The company was founded in 2017 by Guoping and other scientists, mostly from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, one of China’s most active ecosystems for quantum information science. That round was led by the government-backed Shenzhen Capital Group’s Hotland Investment Asset Management with additional participation from CITIC Securities and China International Capital Corporation (CICC), Bank of China Group Investment Limited (BOCGI) and several other Chinese investment institutions.

China now joins the U.S. and Canada as countries that host commercial quantum computing ecosystems.  ... '

Spin Control and Billions of Qubits

A short time ago we were talking a handful of QuBits, now billions?   Implications for 'unsolvable' problems? 

 Spin Control Method Brings Billion-Qubit Quantum Chips Closer

UNSW Sydney Newsroom (Australia)  January 13, 2023

Engineers at Australia's University of New South Wales, Sydney (UNSW Sydney) and quantum computing spin-off Diraq have found a new approach for controlling single-electron spins in quantum dots with precision. The researchers can manipulate a single quantum bit (qubit)'s quantum state using electric fields rather than magnetic fields. The intrinsic spin-orbit electric dipole spin resonance effect "removes the requirement of placing extra structures around each [logic] gate," according to Diraq's Will Gilbert. UNSW's Andrew Dzurak said, "Since it's based on the same CMOS [complementary metal-oxide semiconductor] technology as today's computer industry, our approach will make it easier and faster to scale up for commercial production and achieve our goal of fabricating billions of qubits on a single chip."... '

Ordinary computers can beat Google’s Quantum Computer

 Algorithm vs Computer?  

Ordinary computers can beat Google’s quantum computer after all

Superfast algorithm put crimp in 2019 claim that Google’s machine had achieved “quantum supremacy”

2 AUG 20225:05 PM BY ADRIAN CHO

If the quantum computing era dawned 3 years ago, its rising sun may have ducked behind a cloud. In 2019, Google researchers claimed they had passed a milestone known as quantum supremacy when their quantum computer Sycamore performed in 200 seconds an abstruse calculation they said would tie up a supercomputer for 10,000 years. Now, scientists in China have done the computation in a few hours with ordinary processors. A supercomputer, they say, could beat Sycamore outright.

“I think they’re right that if they had access to a big enough supercomputer, they could have simulated the … task in a matter of seconds,” says Scott Aaronson, a computer scientist at the University of Texas, Austin. The advance takes a bit of the shine off Google’s claim, says Greg Kuperberg, a mathematician at the University of California, Davis. “Getting to 300 feet from the summit is less exciting than getting to the summit.”

Still, the promise of quantum computing remains undimmed, Kuperberg and others say. And Sergio Boixo, principal scientist for Google Quantum AI, said in an email the Google team knew its edge might not hold for very long. “In our 2019 paper, we said that classical algorithms would improve,” he said. But, “we don’t think this classical approach can keep up with quantum circuits in 2022 and beyond.”

The “problem” Sycamore solved was designed to be hard for a conventional computer but as easy as possible for a quantum computer, which manipulates qubits that can be set to 0, 1, or—thanks to quantum mechanics—any combination of 0 and 1 at the same time. Together, Sycamore’s 53 qubits, tiny resonating electrical circuits made of superconducting metal, can encode any number from 0 to 253 (roughly 9 quadrillion)—or even all of them at once.

Starting with all the qubits set to 0, Google researchers applied to single qubits and pairs a random but fixed set of logical operations, or gates, over 20 cycles, then read out the qubits. Crudely speaking, quantum waves representing all possible outputs sloshed among the qubits, and the gates created interference that reinforced some outputs and canceled others. So some should have appeared with greater probability than others. Over millions of trials, a spiky output pattern emerged.

The Google researchers argued that simulating those interference effects would overwhelm even Summit, a supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which has 9216 central processing units and 27,648 faster graphic processing units (GPUs). Researchers with IBM, which developed Summit, quickly countered that if they exploited every bit of hard drive available to the computer, it could handle the computation in a few days. Now, Pan Zhang, a statistical physicist at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and colleagues have shown how to beat Sycamore in a paper in press at Physical Review Letters ..... '

Simulating a Faster Path to Quantum Computing

Impressed by the number of efforts underway regarding quantum ...

Simulating a Faster Path to Quantum  By Tim Hornyak, Commissioned by CACM Staff, June 14, 2022  in ACM

In a bid to accelerate the development of quantum computing applications, supercomputer manufacturer Fujitsu has come up with what it says is the world's fastest 36-qubit quantum simulator.

Quantum simulators attempt to emulate quantum operations on a classical computer. While their speeds are slower than quantum machines, they can serve as a bridge technology before wider implementation of quantum computers, which have limited computing range and can be prone to errors.

The new Fujitsu machine operates on a 64-node PRIMEHPC FX 700 hardware system with the same A64FX processors used in Fugaku, the Fujitsu supercomputer that was knocked off its leading position in late May in the new TOP500 ranking of the world's most powerful supercomputers.

The simulator has a theoretical peak performance of 3.072 teraflops in double-precision floating-point format calculations, and can run the open-source Qulacs quantum circuit simulator software at about twice the speed of other major simulators in 36-qubit operations, according to the company. The machine performs multiple calculations simultaneously using scalable sector extension (SVE) instructions. The SVE specification was incorporated in the A64FX, which Fujitsu developed with Britain's Arm.  .... ' 

Frig Controller for Quantum Computing

Fancy Refrigeration to Control Quantum Chips

 In-Fridge Controller Could Scale Up Quantum Computers

University of Chicago Department of Computer Science, January 10, 2022

Scientists at the University of Chicago were able to control quantum chips by routing signals within a dilution refrigerator using a classical controller operating at room temperature. The researchers confirmed the execution of low-error two-quantum bit (qubit) operations using Superconducting Single Flux Quantum (SFQ) pulses. SFQ is a classical logic technology that can function within the quantum fridge with low power consumption, to enable an in-fridge controller with maximized scalability. This achievement is a critical step toward realizing universal quantum computing at large scales.  ...

IBM debuts Quantum Machine it says no Standard Computer can Match

Yet more advances, now to 127 Qubits.  Implications for complexity?

IBM debuts quantum machine it says no standard computer can match in Fortune

IBM has announced its largest quantum processor to date, as the company seeks to show it is on track to create a commercially useful quantum computer by the end of 2023.

The new quantum hardware, which IBM is calling Eagle, has 127 qubits, which are the information-processing units of a quantum computer. This is a large enough cluster to perform calculations that cannot be made by traditional computers in a reasonable time frame, the company said.

But the company noted it had not yet done a benchmark demonstration to prove that the new processor can perform tasks beyond the grasp of conventional computers, saying only that the new machine is powerful enough that it should be able to do so.

Quantum computers are machines that use phenomena from quantum physics to process information. In a traditional computer, information is represented in a binary form, known as a bit. A bit can be either a zero or one. In a quantum computer, information is represented by a quantum bit, or qubit for short, that can be placed into a quantum state in which it can represent both zero and one at the same time.

Also, in a classical computer, all the bits in a computer chip function independently. In a quantum computer, the qubits are “entangled” with others in the quantum processor, enabling them all to work together to reach a solution. Those two properties give quantum computers, in theory, exponentially more power than a traditional computer.

But to date, quantum computers have been too underpowered—meaning they have too few qubits and those qubits cannot remain in a quantum state long enough—to pose a major challenge to traditional computers. In 2019, Google achieved a milestone called “quantum supremacy” in which it performed a simulation of a quantum physics problem that could not be carried out on a traditional computer. But, as important as that achievement was in the annals of computer science, it did not have any immediate business applications.  ... '