Quantum Computing Week Wrap-up from HPC Wire
Quantum Bits: Rigetti Debuts New Gates, D-Wave Cuts NEC Deal, AWS Jumps into the Quantum Pool
Excerpts and salient points ~
+ There’s been flurry of significant news in the quantum computing world. Yesterday, Rigetti introduced a new family of gates that reduces circuit depth required on some problems and D-Wave struck a deal with NEC to collaborate on hybrid classical-quantum computing. On Monday Intel debuted new quantum system components. Last week AWS unveiled a three-prong quantum initiative, something many had been expecting, that among other things provides a central portal for quantum users to access quantum computing resources from Rigetti, IonQ, and D-Wave – expect more companies to follow.
+ Rigetti’s blog and paper detail the characteristics and advantages of the new family gates and Rigetti is now making them available on its cloud platform. As described in Abrams’ blog, “We introduce a whole new family of two-qubit gates, parameterized by the angle θ, which we’ll write as XY(θ) (where XY() = iSWAP). Using CZ (controlled Z) and XY(θ), an average gate depth reduction of 32% for a random circuit is possible, counting only two-qubit entangling gates. For particular algorithms, these additional gates are more explicitly useful because they preserve qubit excitations.”
+ D-Wave struck a deal with NEC collaborate in three areas: hybrid services that combine NEC’s supercomputers and other classical systems with D-Wave’s quantum technology; application development for use on hybrid systems; and NEC will become a reseller of D-Wave’s Leap cloud service. D-Wave also reported the promotion of Alan Baratz to CEO, effective this January, and retirement of current CEO Vern Brownell after ten years of spearheading D-Wave’s development.
Perhaps the biggest news of the current QC flurry was AWS’s formal entry into the quantum computing arena early last week. AWS announced three initiatives:
- Amazon Braket, a new, managed AWS service that enables scientists, researchers, and developers to begin experimenting with computers from quantum hardware providers (including D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti) in a single place.
- AWS Center for Quantum Computing, which AWS reports will bring together quantum computing experts from Amazon, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and other top academic research institutions to collaborate on the research and development of new quantum computing technologies.
- Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab,a program that connects customers with quantum computing experts from Amazon and its technology and consulting partners to develop internal expertise aimed at identifying practical uses of quantum computing, and accelerating the development of quantum applications with meaningful impact.
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