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Quantum computers today are small in computational scope the chip inside your smartphone contains billions of transistors while the most powerful quantum computer contains a few hundred of the quantum equivalent of a transistor. They are also unreliable. If you run the same calculation over and over, they will most likely churn out different answers each time.

But with their intrinsic ability to consider many possibilities at once, quantum computers do not have to be very large to tackle certain prickly problems of computation, and on Wednesday, IBM researchers announced that they had devised a method to manage the unreliability in a way that would lead to reliable, useful answers.

What IBM showed here is really an amazingly important step in that direction of making progress towards serious quantum algorithmic design, said Dorit Aharonov, a professor of computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who was not involved with the research.

While researchers at Google in 2019 claimed that they had achieved quantum supremacy a task performed much more quickly on a quantum computer than a conventional one IBMs researchers say they have achieved something new and more useful, albeit more modestly named.

Were entering this phase of quantum computing that I call utility, said Jay Gambetta, a vice president of IBM Quantum. The era of utility.

A team of IBM scientists who work for Dr. Gambetta described their results in a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Present-day computers are called digital, or classical, because they deal with bits of information that are either 1 or 0, on or off. A quantum computer performs calculations on quantum bits, or qubits, that capture a more complex state of information. Just as a thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrdinger postulated that a cat could be in a quantum state that is both dead and alive, a qubit can be both 1 and 0 simultaneously.

That allows quantum computers to make many calculations in one pass, while digital ones have to perform each calculation separately. By speeding up computation, quantum computers could potentially solve big, complex problems in fields like chemistry and materials science that are out of reach today. Quantum computers could also have a darker side by threatening privacy through algorithms that break the protections used for passwords and encrypted communications.

When Google researchers made their supremacy claim in 2019, they said their quantum computer performed a calculation in 3 minutes 20 seconds that would take about 10,000 years on a state-of-the-art conventional supercomputer.

But some other researchers, including those at IBM, discounted the claim, saying the problem was contrived. Googles experiment, as impressive it was, and it was really impressive, is doing something which is not interesting for any applications, said Dr. Aharonov, who also works as the chief scientific officer of Qedma, a quantum computing company.

The Google computation also turned out to be less impressive than it first appeared. A team of Chinese researchers was able to perform the same calculation on a non-quantum supercomputer in just over five minutes, far quicker than the 10,000 years the Google team had estimated.

The IBM researchers in the new study performed a different task, one that interests physicists. They used a quantum processor with 127 qubits to simulate the behavior of 127 atom-scale bar magnets tiny enough to be governed by the spooky rules of quantum mechanics in a magnetic field. That is a simple system known as the Ising model, which is often used to study magnetism.

This problem is too complex for a precise answer to be calculated even on the largest, fastest supercomputers.

On the quantum computer, the calculation took less than a thousandth of a second to complete. Each quantum calculation was unreliable fluctuations of quantum noise inevitably intrude and induce errors but each calculation was quick, so it could be performed repeatedly.

Indeed, for many of the calculations, additional noise was deliberately added, making the answers even more unreliable. But by varying the amount of noise, the researchers could tease out the specific characteristics of the noise and its effects at each step of the calculation.

We can amplify the noise very precisely, and then we can rerun that same circuit, said Abhinav Kandala, the manager of quantum capabilities and demonstrations at IBM Quantum and an author of the Nature paper. And once we have results of these different noise levels, we can extrapolate back to what the result would have been in the absence of noise.

In essence, the researchers were able to subtract the effects of noise from the unreliable quantum calculations, a process they call error mitigation.

You have to bypass that by inventing very clever ways to mitigate the noise, Dr. Aharonov said. And this is what they do.

Altogether, the computer performed the calculation 600,000 times, converging on an answer for the overall magnetization produced by the 127 bar magnets.

But how good was the answer?

For help, the IBM team turned to physicists at the University of California, Berkeley. Although an Ising model with 127 bar magnets is too big, with far too many possible configurations, to fit in a conventional computer, classical algorithms can produce approximate answers, a technique similar to how compression in JPEG images throws away less crucial data to reduce the size of the file while preserving most of the images details.

Michael Zaletel, a physics professor at Berkeley and an author of the Nature paper, said that when he started working with IBM, he thought his classical algorithms would do better than the quantum ones.

It turned out a little bit differently than I expected, Dr. Zaletel said.

Certain configurations of the Ising model can be solved exactly, and both the classical and quantum algorithms agreed on the simpler examples. For more complex but solvable instances, the quantum and classical algorithms produced different answers, and it was the quantum one that was correct.

Thus, for other cases where the quantum and classical calculations diverged and no exact solutions are known, there is reason to believe that the quantum result is more accurate, said Sajant Anand, a graduate student at Berkeley who did much of the work on the classical approximations.

It is not clear that quantum computing is indisputably the winner over classical techniques for the Ising model.

Mr. Anand is currently trying to add a version of error mitigation for the classical algorithm, and it is possible that could match or surpass the performance of the quantum calculations.

Its not obvious that theyve achieved quantum supremacy here, Dr. Zaletel said.

In the long run, quantum scientists expect that a different approach, error correction, will be able to detect and correct calculation mistakes, and that will open the door for quantum computers to speed ahead for many uses.

Error correction is already used in conventional computers and data transmission to fix garbles. But for quantum computers, error correction is likely years away, requiring better processors able to process many more qubits.

Error mitigation, the IBM scientists believe, is an interim solution that can be used now for increasingly complex problems beyond the Ising model.

This is one of the simplest natural science problems that exists, Dr. Gambetta said. So its a good one to start with. But now the question is, how do you generalize it and go to more interesting natural science problems?

Those might include figuring out the properties of exotic materials, accelerating drug discovery and modeling fusion reactions.

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Quantum Computing Advance Begins New Era, IBM Says - The New York Times

Intel has built a quantum processor called Tunnel Falls that it will offer to research labs hoping to make the revolutionary computing technology practical.

The Tunnel Falls processor, announced Thursday, houses 12 of the fundamental data processing elements called qubits. It's a major step in the chipmaker's attempt to develop quantum computing hardware it hopes will eventually surpass rivals.

Intel, unlike most of its rivals, makes its qubits from individual electrons housed in computer chips that are cousins to those that power millions of PCs. The company is lagging behind. Rivals like IBM, Google, Quantinuum and IonQ have been offering quantum computers for years, but Intel believes tying its fortunes to conventional chip technology will ultimately enable faster progress.

"To me, it's natural to use the tools already developed rather than having to develop new tools," said Jim Clarke, director of quantum computing hardware at Intel Labs. Intel makes its own quantum computing chips at its D1 fab in Oregon.

You won't buy your own quantum computer, but they could affect your life very directly. Among those investing in the technology are financial services companies seeking more profitable investments, materials science researchers hoping for better batteries, pharmaceutical companies trying to design better drugs and governments trying to crack adversaries' encrypted communications.

Those challenges are out of reach of conventional computers, but quantum computing has the potential to tackle them by taking advantage of the weird physics of the ultrasmall. Today's quantum computers aren't generally practical, and the full promise of the technology remains years away, but physicists and engineers have made steady progress year after year.

Intel, an expert in large-scale manufacturing, hopes to help speed things along by building many quantum chips, which it calls quantum processing units, or QPUs. The University of Maryland, one of the centers benefiting from a US government program to accelerate quantum computing progress, will use Intel machines.

One notable feature of quantum computing is the tremendous variety of approaches. Intel is using electrons, storing data with a quantum mechanical property called spin that's analogous to the two directions a top can spin. IBM and Google are using small electrical circuits of superconducting materials. IonQ and Quantinuum manipulate charged atoms stored in a trap. Other approaches involve neutral atoms and even that most fleeting of particles, the photon.

At a sufficiently small scale, quantum mechanics dominates physics and anything can become a qubit, quantum computing pioneer and MIT researcher Seth Lloyd said in an earlier interview. "It's a question of whether you can massage them in the right way to convince them to compute."

In other words, quantum computing isn't a horse race like in the traditional computer chip market. It's more like a horse pitted against a falcon, a motorcycle and an Olympic sprinter.

Intel likes its approach. Tunnel Falls is in manufacturing today, but the company very soon will "tape out" its successor, meaning the design is finished, and it's begun designing the model after that, Clarke said. Twelve qubits is a tiny fraction of what's needed for useful quantum computers, but Intel started with a simple approach designed for fast improvement and sustained progress over the years required to make serious quantum computers.

Intel's Tunnel Falls quantum computer test chip perched on a fingertip

"The next big milestone is when we have a few thousand qubits," a quantity that will let quantum computer engineers correct the frequent errors that plague qubit operations, Clarke said. "That's probably three, four years, maybe five years away," Clarke said. "And it's probably the early 2030s or mid-2030s before we have a million cubits that are going to change the world."

And Intel is engineering not just the QPUs, but the crucial data links that link each qubit to the outside world. Today's quantum computers often look like high-tech chandeliers, with gleaming metal communication conduits looping down toward the processor, but that bulky design won't work with thousands or millions of qubits, and Intel believes its control chips and chip interconnect technology will be necessary parts of an overall system.

One of Intel's biggest rivals, IBM, already offers multiple 127-qubit quantum computers for research and commercial use, with a 433-qubit machine up and running.

"We have a plan to get this out to hundreds of thousands of qubits using superconducting qubits," said Jerry Chow, leader of IBM's quantum computing hardware effort. IBM is working on quantum computer chips with a flock of code names -- Egret, Heron, Condor, Crossbill -- that are designed to prove out new technologies to reduce errors and improve the qubit-to-qubit connections that are central to the machines.

And it's making progress. On Wednesday, it secured a coveted spot on the cover of the journal Nature for research showing its 127-qubit Eagle quantum computing chip can surpass conventional machines in simulating the materials physics that produce effects like magnetism.

Intel tried and rejected the supercomputing qubit approach, Clarke said. Its spin qubits are a million times smaller than a superconducting circuit, letting the company fit 25,000 of them on each 300mm silicon wafer that transits through its chip fabrication plant, called a fab. When Intel finds a problem building quantum chips, it figures out how to adapt the qubit to traditional chip manufacturing, not vice versa.

Such arguments haven't persuaded others. Google is sticking with superconducting qubits.

"Superconducting qubits lead in critical metrics. We are confident they are the leading technology for the future of quantum supercomputers," Google said in a statement, pointing to their processing speed and progress toward error correction to keep calculations on track longer. "We see a clear path to scale our technology to large-scale, error-corrected machines of general use."

And IonQ Chief Executive Peter Chapman believes Intel's approach is too inflexible for practical, large-scale quantum computers. His company is developing ion trap machines that scoot charged atoms around, letting different qubits interact with each other for computation. Fixing qubits onto the surface of a chip drastically complicates computations, he said.

"What worked in computing in the past -- silicon-based processors -- is not the right solution for the age of quantum," Chapman said.

The deep disagreements about the best approach will perhaps be resolved as the machines evolve and grow larger. Intel's plans rely on its manufacturing advantage, tapping into its experience building some of the most complicated electronics devices on the planet.

"Not everybody has a fab like this in their back pocket," Clarke said.

Correction, 9:33 a.m. PT: This story misstated the particles out of which Intel makes qubits. It uses electrons.

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Intel Enters the Quantum Computing Horse Race With 12-Qubit Chip - CNET

Cleveland Clinic and IBM officially unveiled the first deployment of an onsite private sector IBM-managed quantum computer in the US. The IBM Quantum System One installed at Cleveland Clinic will be the first quantum computer in the world to be uniquely dedicated to healthcare research with an aim to help Cleveland Clinic accelerate biomedical discoveries.

The unveiling comes as a key milestone in Cleveland Clinics and IBMs 10-year Discovery Accelerator partnership that was announced in 2021 and is focused on advancing the pace of biomedical research through the use of high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. Quantum computing is a rapidly emerging technology that harnesses the laws of quantum mechanics to solve problems that todays most powerful supercomputers cannot practically solve. The ability to tap into these new computational spaces could help researchers identify new medicines and treatments more quickly.

Related:Technology-driven convergence in the life sciences industry

This is a pivotal milestone in our innovative partnership with IBM, as we explore new ways to apply the power of quantum computing to healthcare, said Tom Mihaljevic, M.D., Cleveland Clinic CEO and President and Morton L. Mandel CEO Chair. This technology holds tremendous promise in revolutionizing healthcare and expediting progress toward new cares, cures, and solutions for patients. Quantum and other advanced computing technologies will help researchers tackle historic scientific bottlenecks and potentially find new treatments for patients with diseases like cancer, Alzheimers, and diabetes.

With the unveiling of IBM Quantum System One at Cleveland Clinic, their team of world-class researchers can now explore and uncover new scientific advancements in biomedical research, according to Arvind Krishna, IBM Chairman and CEO. By combining the power of quantum computing, artificial intelligence and other next-generation technologies with Cleveland Clinics world-renowned leadership in healthcare and life sciences, we hope to ignite a new era of accelerated discovery.

In addition to quantum computing, the Cleveland Clinic-IBM Discovery Accelerator draws upon a variety of IBMs latest advancements in computing technologies, including high-performance computing via the hybrid cloud and artificial intelligence. Researchers from both organizations are collaborating closely on a robust portfolio of projects with these advanced technologies to generate and analyze massive amounts of data to enhance research.

Related:Powering virtual clinical trials with specialised software

The Cleveland Clinic-IBM Discovery Accelerator has generated multiple projects that leverage the latest in quantum computing, AI, and hybrid cloud to help expedite discoveries in biomedical research. These include:

The Discovery Accelerator also serves as the technology foundation for Cleveland Clinics Global Center for Pathogen & Human Health Research, part of the Cleveland Innovation District. The center, supported by a US$500 million investment from the State of Ohio, Jobs Ohio and Cleveland Clinic, brings together a team focused on studying, preparing and protecting against emerging pathogens and virus-related diseases.

Through the Discovery Accelerator, researchers are leveraging advanced computational technology to expedite critical research into treatments and vaccines.

This article appears in Omnia Health magazine.Read the full issue online today.

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First quantum computer dedicated to healthcare research revealed - Omnia Health Insights