“The project demonstrates that IBM’s concepts around quantum processors work, can be reproduced and are stable enough to support cloud-based access and services”, said King. “This moment represents the birth of quantum cloud computing”.
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By exploiting the weirdness of quantum mechanics, quantum computers can store and process information as qubits, which can be a mixture of 0 and 1 at the same time.
Charles King, an analyst with Pund-IT, Inc., said IBM’s 5-qubit processor should be powerful enough to handle a variety of research and other computations.
A report published in Zdnet said, “There won’t be a charge for the quantum computing tryout”. With a quantum computer built of just 50 qubits, none of today’s TOP500 supercomputers could successfully emulate it, reflecting the tremendous potential of this technology. What it has are quantum processors, which are much smaller than a full-scale computer. A universal quantum computer would pack hundreds of thousands of millions of qubits.
However, IBM believes processors with 50 to 100 qubits could be available within a decade.
Coupled with software expertise from the IBM Research ecosystem, the team has built a dynamic user interface on the IBM Cloud platform that allows users to easily connect to the quantum hardware via the cloud. Signals are sent in and out of a cryogenic dilution refrigerator to measure operations on the quantum processor. “IBM will determine how much access people receive to the processor depending on their technology background and how well versed they are in quantum technology, explained Jerry Chow, the manager of IBM’s experimental quantum computing group”, according to a news report published by Fortune. At the center are qubits, which allows the systems to perform significantly more complex calculations than is possible with today’s fastest supercomputer. To put it another way, Google’s quantum computer did in one second what it would take a conventional system 10,000 years to complete. In order to function as a quantum computer, it has to be super-cooled at all times. Qubits can be fragile, and their behavior or state could be hard to predict once they start interacting, or “entangling”, in a calculation.
But so far it’s proven hard to build quantum devices with more than a handful of qubits. Research is underway to resolve simultaneous data errors in superpositioned qubit arrays, also called phase-flip errors. Quantum computers provide an alternative computational path, and programs will need to be written differently for execution on IBM’s quantum processor.
A quantum computer uses qubits, instead of the bits used in classic computers.
“It will allow people to test algorithms and quantum code through the simulation, as well as develop applications for quantum systems”. One relates to Grover’s algorithm, which can be used to search unstructured databases and find answers faster than conventional computers. IBM has also formed the IBM Research Frontiers Institute to partner with researchers and organizations to advance quantum computing.
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“For casual, new person to quantum computing, this is where you can learn through examples”.
