IBM announces 50-fold quantum speed improvement

IBM launched its most advanced quantum computer yet last week at its inaugural quantum developer conference. It features nearly twice the gates of last year’s quantum utility demonstration – and a 50-fold speed increase.

Last year, in a paper published in Nature, IBM announced a , can handle circuits of up to 5,000 gates, and the same experiment was completed in 2.2 hours.

“This circuit itself is mainly used for benchmarking right now, but could be used for calculating expectation values for materials science problems,” Mittal says.

IBM

And there’s another improvement. Last year’s experiment used custom circuits and software. Now, IBM customers can run the same experiments using IBM’s quantum computing software development kit, Qiskit.

Up until now, the users were computational scientists exploring how these quantum circuits can be used for specific scientific domains, Mittal says. That’s starting to change. “At the 5,000-gate operations scale, we are also starting to see the emergence of quantum working in line with classical computing to calculate the properties of systems that are relevant to chemistry,” he says.

Today, researchers, scientists, and quantum developers are beginning to leverage quantum computing to help solve complex problems. For example, Cleveland Clinic is exploring this technology to simulate molecular bonds, which is key to solving pharmaceutical problems.

“We are pushing through traditional scientific boundaries using cutting-edge technology such as Qiskit to advance research and find new treatments for patients around the globe,” says Lara Jehi, chief research information officer at Cleveland Clinic, in a statement. “

“The work with Cleveland Clinic is already beginning to yield results,” says Mittal. The secret sauce, he says, is that the Cleveland Clinic combined classical and quantum computing in one workflow, which produced results not possible with quantum alone.

“Enterprises can use our utility-scale systems now,” he says. “However, our ultimate goal is that developers now use these existing quantum computers to search for heuristic quantum advantages, much like the early days of GPUs being employed to find speedups in high-performance computing.”

But quantum advantage – where quantum computers are cheaper, faster, or more accurate than traditional computers – is still a few years away, he says.

IBM also demonstrated its generative AI-powered Qiskit Code Assistant, first announced a month ago, which is now in private preview. The assistant, which is built on top of IBM’s Granite gen AI models, helps users build quantum circuits, or migrate old quantum code to the latest version of Qiskit.

The latest announcement is important because it couples progress on the hardware side with that of the software, says Heather West, research manager in the infrastructure systems, platforms, and technology group at IDC.

“Not only has IBM introduced a method for efficiently scaling their systems in a modular fashion, they are also introducing the software that is needed to help optimize the circuits that will run on the hardware,” she says.

But we’re not at the end goal yet, she adds. “Like all other quantum hardware vendors, IBM is still trying to solve the : Boeing plans to send a satellite into space to facilitate quantum communications, the company announced at the Quantum World Congress.