Two years after unveiling its quantum roadmap, IBM is keeping pace with its goals. The company revealed on Tuesday new plans to deliver a quantum computer with more than 4,000 qubits by 2025. These advances will take quantum computing beyond the experimental phase by 2025, according to Arvind Krishna. , CEO of IBM.
For some simple use cases, companies should be able to deploy quantum computers “between 2023 and 2025,” the CEO says ahead of the annual IBM Think conference in Boston. This means, he explains, that manufacturers of electric vehicles will be able to use quantum computers to analyze materials like lithium hydride to develop better batteries, or they could analyze the possibilities of lighter vehicles, but stronger. Other companies, meanwhile, could use quantum computers for simple optimization cases, such as search engine optimization.
“As we start reaching 4,000 qubits, a lot of these problems become within the reach of quantum computers,” Arvind Krishna says.
Leverage quantum to solve complex problems
In the meantime, more complex problems related to quantum computing could be solved a few years later, predicts the CEO. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, could reap benefits by 2025 or 2030, he adds.
“If you’re thinking about pharmaceutical drugs…it’ll probably be a little later,” he says, adding that IBM is in “deep discussions with a few of these biotech companies.”
“Covid vaccines have taught many of them that informatics applied to medicine can get things done much faster,” he continues. “They all woke up to what computing can do. You can imagine some of them thinking a bit further to say, “what can we do with quantum?” »
After Eagle, Osprey
In 2020, IBM announced that it would ship a 1,121-qubit device in 2023, along with components and cooling systems. The company also released images of a 2-meter-wide, 3-meter-tall cooling system being built to house a 1,121-qubit processor called the IBM Quantum Condor. According to IBM, the goal is to build a quantum system of one million qubits. The company sees the 1,000 qubit mark as a tipping point to overcome the hurdles that limit the commercialization of quantum systems.
While building Condor, IBM last year announced Eagle, a 127-qubit processor. Later this year, IBM plans to unveil its 433-qubit processor called Osprey.
“To reach 4,000 [qubits], there are a lot of problems that we have to solve,” says Arvind Krishna. “How do you start scaling these systems? How do you communicate with each other, how do you get the software to scale and run from a cloud in those computers? These are all issues that we think we have a line of sight to…so we’re very confident in our 2025 timeline.”
Qiskit Runtime in development
In addition to working on physical quantum computers, IBM will continue in 2023 to improve the development of Qiskit Runtime, its open-source software that allows users to interact with quantum computers. It will also implement cloud-based workflows for a serverless approach into IBM’s core quantum software stack.
Arvind Krishna adds that IBM will likely be “open to all approaches” to delivering quantum computing, including selling it as a machine, providing it as a managed service to customers, or providing it as an on-premises service.
Source: ZDNet.com