One of the most exciting initiatives we have at IBM Research
is our effort to build a quantum computer. This will be one of
the great milestones in the history of information technology.
Quantum computing, it is rooted in nature.
Nature computes. So what we're really doing is
understanding those fundamental aspects of nature
and creating a version of it that allows us to do universal
forms of computation. The idea of putting quantum computing on the
cloud is the beginning of something truly important.
Jay Gambetta: We’re going to put 5 qubits and give access to anyone and
one of the great things about putting this on the web, they're
going to play with quantum objects, place them around, see what
they do and hopefully build up an intuition much like we have
with classical physics. Jerry Chow: Welcome to one of our quantum computing labs.
Right over here's one of our dilution refrigeration
systems which actually cool down our super conducting qubit devices.
There are a number of different plates inside here, which all
sit at different temperatures. That gets down all the way it to
15 millikelvin. Now that's colder than outer space itself. One the
real difficulties with making a quantum computer is
keeping quantum information alive and essentially trying to
preserve that quantum information. You can almost think of it as
trying to do something impossible like balancing an egg at the
tip of a pencil. There's certainly some configurations which you
might be able to do it but essentially it's going to tip over.
And how you actually actively keep it in its place
and preserve it is one of the real aspects that we work on
trying to improve our devices and to make quantum computing happen.
now here I have just a plain old
cup of coffee. Caffeine is already a molecule that
is so large that essentially there's no computer
in the world that will ever be able to fully simulate it.
The interesting thing is that the physics that governs how this
molecule's put together is essentially quantum. And so
if the molecule follows quantum mechanics then it would be kind of
silly to try to stimulate that with conventional
computing which uses these zeros and ones. These bits. The real
potential is in designing things like drugs and understanding
objects like proteins and different compounds that are really
essential for life. Dario Gil: When we're able to build universal quantum
computer we will be able to solve certain problems
exponentially faster. We will impact a broad variety of fields,
whether we're talking the area of cryptography or machine learning
or searching large databases... Jerry Chow: Now quantum computing
has the potential to unlock all of that. Jay Gambetta: The project is hard. It's
difficult. We don't know how to do it all. We have great people that
are really passionate about what they're doing and we get to have
great interactions conversations as a very strong
relationship between the theory team here and the experimental team.
Jerry Chow: Having the infrastructure in place here at IBM and allowing
someone to access it is going to be really important for
developing new applications in the future.
Dario Gil: We're not going to have quantum computers in our pocket. We
will have quantum systems in the cloud that we will be able to access.
And for a lot of people, day-to-day basis, they may not even
know that their information is coming from a quantum computer in the
future, but they will benefit from the value that the quantum computers
have created. By the time we have 50 qubits or so
that system, no conventional classical computer
one that we've ever built for could ever build
could emulate what that 50 quit quantum system will have.
And that we're going to see it in the years to come. This is not
decades away or a 100 years away. That quantum
age has now come.
