IBM is doubling down on its stake in the nascent quantum computing market, announcing plans to build commercially available universal quantum systems. It's a bold but not unexpected move following Big Blue's unveiling last year of Quantum Experience, which allowed the public to interact with an IBM quantum computer through its cloud.
Now IBM's go-to-market plans for quantum have become a bit more defined. From its announcement:
IBM intends to build IBM Q systems to expand the application domain of quantum computing. A key metric will be the power of a quantum computer expressed by the "Quantum Volume," which includes the number of qubits, quality of quantum operations, qubit connectivity and parallelism. As a first step to increase Quantum Volume, IBM aims at constructing commercial IBM Q systems with ~50 qubits in the next few years to demonstrate capabilities beyond today's classical systems, and plans to collaborate with key industry partners to develop applications that exploit the quantum speedup of the systems.
IBM Q systems will be designed to tackle problems that are currently seen as too complex and exponential in nature for classical computing systems to handle. One of the first and most promising applications for quantum computing will be in the area of chemistry. Even for simple molecules like caffeine, the number of quantum states in the molecule can be astoundingly large – so large that all the conventional computing memory and processing power scientists could ever build could not handle the problem.
A simple explanation of how quantum computing works is hard to find, although a good one is Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's heralded, off-the-cuff description at a physics conference.
Essentially, while classical computers are binary, storing bits as either a one or a zero, quantum systems take advantage of the behavior of subatomic particles, which can hold multiple states, a phenomena known as superposition that stands to give quantum systems vast amounts of processing power.
In the more immediate future, IBM has released an API (application programming interface) for Quantum Experience, as well as a new simulator for Experience that can model circuits with as many as 20 qubits. A full SDK (software development kit) for Quantum Experience is coming in the first half of this year.
Since its availability last year, some 40,000 users have conducted more than 275,000 experiments on Quantum Experience, according to a statement. The API and SDK should dramatically accelerate interest in the platform going forward.
IBM believes quantum computers will become a complement and not a replacement to classical computers, because they can solve problems the latter can't. Beyond chemistry, it names areas such as supply chain, financial services, artificial intelligence and cloud security as possible sweet spots for quantum computing.
Big Blue is not the only company going after the quantum computing market. Startup D-Wave has sold its systems to the likes of Google (which is also working on quantum systems).
In releasing the SDK and API, IBM is following a similar and necessary move by D-Wave, which open-sourced Qbsolv, a software tool that provides an abstraction layer against D-Wave's hardware, eliminating the need for developers to have schooling in quantum physics.
There just aren't a whole lot of quantum scientists around, and if IBM, D-Wave or any other company wants a viable commercial market for quantum computing, more and better developer tools are going to be crucial.
IBM's release of Quantum Experience as a cloud service also foretells the market's future. Quantum systems can be highly unstable, and to mitigate this are generally held at extremely cold temperatures. Unless there are advances allowing them to operate well at closer to room temperature (and there has been at least one reported breakthrough in this area), it's going to make much more sense to tap remote quantum systems held in specialized data centers than attempting to run them in-house.
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