Quantum Computing Explained: From Science Fiction to Reality

Most computers we use today are like cars. Familiar, reliable, built for roads we understand. They follow lanes, signs, traffic lights, and rules that everyone, well, almost everyone, knows how to navigate. But where do you go when the road ends or when there's no road at all? You need something else. A quantum computer. We as humans went from transportation on land with cars and trains to transportation with airplanes and flights. When we can fly, we go to new continents, we cross oceans, we enter this new dimension. And it's much the same thing with classical versus quantum computing. Not a faster car, but a dimension that roads are never capable of reaching. Everything around us is built from matter that follows the laws of quantum mechanics, the fundamental rules that govern the nature of reality. Quantum computers are designed to understand and model these systems. Take a protein molecule, a building block of life at the molecular level. It's an entangled quantum object. Molecules are just extremely difficult to simulate to high accuracy. It's an exponentially large problem. And that's really what is a fundamental limit to what we can compute using even the most powerful supercomputers from a classical sense. To address this, quantum computers can be paired with the most advanced supercomputers to make quantum-centric supercomputing. Here, quantum processing units, or QPUs, are brought together with classical GPUs and CPUs. What we call quantum-centric supercomputing. Breaking down these highly challenging problems into these constituent pieces that can be run on these different types of processing capabilities. And increasingly, those systems are producing real scientific results. IBM, Cleveland Clinic, and Japan's RIKEN Institute used quantum-centric supercomputing to simulate a protein made up of over 12,000 atoms, the largest molecule ever modeled on a quantum computer. This result demonstrated how quantum computing can help tackle scientific problems that will be challenging for classical computers working alone. The bigger picture for all of this is for us to study, understand chemistry better. This means researchers can better design therapeutics and advance drug discovery. So I think when people hear the words quantum computing, they often think about something very sci-fi. Quantum computing, IBM has been at it for many, many years. In fact, many decades. Right here in this Thomas J. Watson Research Center is probably where the words quantum information science was first written. In fact, by IBM fellow Charlie Bennett in the 1970s. And we've been at it since those theory days. At IBM, roadmaps have always been in our DNA. We put the first quantum computer in the cloud in 2016. We've seen over 4 trillion circuits run on our hardware. Over 6,000 papers actually get published. There's an appetite to use these machines and that we're here to enable it. And so a big part of our roadmap has also been to improve the number of operations that you can accurately run. And that means using concepts of error correction or error mitigation to let you scale out that number of operations. And so with our more recent generations of devices like Heron and Nighthawk, really driving that kind of quality aspect as well has been critical to really kind of planning and calling our shot, but then also hitting it. The question isn't whether it's possible. It's what's next. Next decade of quantum computing is going to be extremely challenging, but also exciting. Getting towards these fault tolerant quantum computers at scale. But I think a broader picture that we have is really as we proceed into the next decade, there's the opportunity for even more quantum technologies to enter the landscape. So we're heading to our quantum characterization lab. It's one of our R&D labs where we actually test the number of our quantum processors before they go out for deployment in the data center. Quantum is here. Quantum is now. There's already a lot going on in terms of technology, in terms of using these machines, in terms of integrating them with various applications and workflows. Some problems can't be solved by staying in your lane. See where IBM quantum can take you at ibm.com slash quantum.