Under the deal, Google, along with partners NASA and the Universities Space Research Association, will receive the latest quantum computer systems as they become available from D-Wave, a Canadian company that specializes in the next-generation technology.
Advertisement
Google and NASA have announced the installation of a new state-of-the-art quantum computer at their Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab (QuAIL) that will solve some “impossible” calculations for them.
“Working with the D-Wave processors has helped us develop and fine-tune models of quantum annealing”, said Hartmut Neven, Google’s head of the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, The Verge reports. Also part of the study was physicist John Martinis, who was hired by Google two months later for the Quantum AI Lab. D-Wave disputed this claim, but there hasn’t been much more meaningful testing of the technology since. The trouble is that, so far, there’s been some suggestion that it isn’t actually as great as it’s made out to be.
Which is all well and good and shows that NASA and Google have a major commitment to experimenting in quantum computing. Where D-Wave chains together hundreds of qubits with higher error rates, the UC Santa Barbara group is working with smaller numbers of more reliable qubits, and struggling to maintain low error rates at the scale of the D-Wave machine. The system, now operational, features a a thousand+ qubit quantum processor. D-Wave’s customers include some of the world’s most prominent organizations including Lockheed Martin and Google, whose system is hosted at NASA’s Ames Research Center. It already has its own division concentrating on hardware research using the technology.
D-Wave mentioned in a press release that the order was the biggest in its historical past, and an important in getting the little-understood know-how off the bottom.
“Google’s effort is very complementary”, said Brownell.
Advertisement
Quantum computing is a relatively recent development in the field of computing and is now being contested by some experts. The machines was used “to discover the potential for quantum computing and its applicability to a broad vary of advanced issues reminiscent of net search, speech recognition, planning and scheduling, air-site visitors administration, robotic missions to different planets, and assist operations in mission management facilities”.
