Rafiq Islam, (Kansas City): Recently, researchers from Google had demonstrated an extraordinary speed of quantum computers, as compared to traditional supercomputers, with a benchmark test known as “quantum supremacy.” The Google team designed an algorithm that could run an analysis in 200 seconds on a small quantum processor, a 53-qubit superconducting test chip. This would take the most powerful supercomputer approximately 10,000 years to perform. That’s an extraordinary feat illustrating what a quantum computing can achieve.
Instead of binary system (bits) in modern computers, Quantum computing uses quantum bits, or ‘qubits’. It is a superposition state which does not have a value in between “0” and “1”, rather, when measured, the qubit has a probability of either the value “0” or value “1”. Thus, with a qubit, one can have 2 bits at the same time (which would take 8 bits for a regular), making the process much faster. It also uses less energy.
Quantum computing receives a lot of attention due to its potential to take on problems beyond the capabilities of today’s computers in, for example, new drug discovery, financial modeling or exploring how the universe works. Universities, governments and technology companies around the world are working to achieve a commercially-viable quantum computing system. While the collective progress is real – and is getting noticed – the field is still at miles away from commercialization, that is, “quantum practicality”.
To get a sense of what it would take to achieve quantum practicality, Intel researchers used high-performance quantum simulator to predict the point at which a quantum computer could outpace a supercomputer in solving an optimization problem called Max-Cut as a test case since it is widely used in everything from traffic management to electronic design and it is an algorithm that gets exponentially more complicated as the number of variables increases. After extensive simulations, it was realized that it will take at least hundreds, if not thousands, of qubits working reliably before quantum computers will be able to solve practical problems faster than supercomputers. In other words, it will take years before the industry can develop a functional quantum processor of this size. Intel has developed a technology known as spin qubits on 300 mm silicon wafers and believes that spin qubits have a major scaling advantage over superconducting qubits, because they are much smaller than their counterparts. Spin qubits resemble a single electron transistor. To further speed research and feedback cycles, it also designed a new tool, called the Cryoprober (Cryogenic Wafer Prober) to test and characterize these spin qubits. These all are exciting small steps to overcome many challenges ahead- and to pass many mile markers – before this technology become commercially available and change computing process forever.