As a part of this initiative, IBM is working on a 50 qubits quantum computer for use in various fields including artificial intelligence, cloud security, etc. As announced today, the tech giant is now expanding its Quantum Experience program launched a year ago with the release of new API (Application Program Interface) along with an SDK (Software Development Kit). The API enables programmers and developers to begin building interfaces that will connect classical computers and legacy systems to the existing five quantum (qubit) cloud-based quantum computer without needing a deep understanding or background in physics.
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IBM has made its quantum computing system commercially available to businesses and beefed up an existing system used by the research community.
According to the company, a full SDK on the IBM Quantum Experience will be available in the first half of 2017.
Having now overcome most of the major scientific hurdles surrounding quantum computers, IBM is ready to start exploring their practical applications.
Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president of IBM Systems said: “Classical computers are extraordinarily powerful and will continue to advance and underpin everything we do in business and society”. The New York-based computing giant is also helping research partners Hitachi Metals, JSR, Samsung, Honda, and Nagase explore potential uses for quantum technology. The company said that this is why academia and industry will need to work together over the next decade to bring more useful quantum computers to market. While quantum computing has largely been theoretical for most of its history, with the Quantum Experience, IBM has built up 10 months of understanding how to keep a quantum system running to handle various requests.
Quantum computing is the study of theoretical computation systems that use quantum mechanical phenomena like superposition and entanglement to perform operations on data. Chuang, for example, used it in an online, graduate-level class on quantum computing that he taught late a year ago, so that students could practise programming an actual quantum computer.
Quantum computing has the promise of outperforming today’s computers to an extraordinary degree at certain tasks such as factoring very large numbers.
Since it was launched last May, the response to IBM’s 5-qubit quantum computer was wonderful, with 15 research papers written by the external community, more than 200,000 experiments and about 40,000 users. The company also said it will release an upgraded simulator that can model circuits with up to 20 qubits.
“We’re hoping to develop an ecosystem of people with hands-on experience running algorithms and experiments on a quantum computer”, Chow says.
Quantum computers are radically different than conventional PCs and could ultimately replace today’s PCs and servers. Google believes that in less than five years, it should be able to commercialize access to its quantum computer, as well.
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Quantum computing is poised to transform our lives.
