Magnetic materials are used to make MRI machines, hard drives, wireless chargers, and phone speakers.
It takes a lot of expensive research and development to create new materials.
“And there’s no shortage of applications for new discovery of magnetic materials,” says Alan Baratz, CEO at D-Wave Quantum, a company that makes annealing-style quantum computers.
That’s why today’s announcement that they were able to simulate a complex magnetic material with a quantum computer is so important. It’s not just a theoretical exercise. It solves a real-world problem.
And D-Wave’s computer took just minutes. By comparison, today’s fastest supercomputer would have taken nearly a million years, and more power than the entire planet consumes in a year.
“We are the first and only company to achieve this very significant milestone,” Baratz told journalists at a press conference earlier today. “We have shown quantum supremacy on complex material simulation problems. Full stop. And this is a first for the industry.”
D-Wave published its results today, peer-reviewed in the journal Science.
The classical supercomputer that D-Wave benchmarked against was the Frontier supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It was, until recently, the most powerful supercomputer in the world but moved to second place in November.
Two different groups of researchers published competing papers, claiming to have solved the same problem with classical computers.
However, according to Baratz, the two competing groups — the Flatiron Institute and the Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL) — only tackled a very small subset of the problem.
Quantum commercial uses
D-Wave already claims a number of enterprise customers for its quantum computers, including NTT Docomo, Mitsubishi Estate, Volkswagen, Toyota, Pattison Food Group, Ford Otosan, who are using it in production.
The use of the D-Wave annealing quantum computer for simulating magnetic systems is already being explored at Los Alamos National Labs and the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, said Trevor Lanting, D-Wave’s chief development officer.
“There is growing and rich research interest,” he said. “And we should see enterprise adoption as the breadth and richness of these simulations evolves.”
The Advantage2 computer that was used to achieve today’s milestone is available for customers today on D-Wave’s Leap real-time quantum cloud service. In addition, the very latest model of the Advantage2 is four times larger than the one used to demonstrate quantum supremacy.
According to Lanting, D-Wave’s quantum platform is the only one with over 99% availability via its cloud platform.
“And we actually over SLAs in the use of our systems,” he adds. “We’re the only company in the industry that does.”
The downside of annealing quantum computers is that they’re not the general-purpose quantum computers being built by companies like IBM, IonQ, Alice & Bob, and QuEra.
They’re more like early analog computers. As a result, the use cases are limited.
In addition to the new use case of simulating magnetic systems, D-Wave computers are also used to solve hard business optimization problems in workforce scheduling, production scheduling, logistics routing, resource optimization, and cargo loading. They are also used in the financial services, drug discovery, fault detection, and supply chain management.
D-Wave’s latest iteration, the Advantage2, is faster and more reliable than its predecessor, the company said. But it is also more flexible.
“We’re innovating on the controls,” Lanting says. “As the controls mature, the scope of the simulations you can do on our processors will grow.”
Source:: Network World