Monthly Archives: June 2017

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June 23, 2017, 11:36 AM EDT

SoftBank Group Corp.s $100 billion Vision Fund is scouting for possible investments in quantum computing, an experimental science being researched by companies such as Google and IBM to succeed current computer processor technology.

Shu Nyatta, who helps invest money for the fund, said the group wanted to find and back the company whose quantum computing hardware or software that runs atop it would become the de facto industry standard.

We are happy to invest enough to create that standard around which the whole industry can coalesce, Nyatta said, speaking during a panel discussion at a conference on quantum computing in Munich Thursday.

The Vision Fund, which has attracted investment from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, Apple Inc. and other large institutional backers, is investing in cutting edge technologies from virtual reality to the Internet of Things. It recently invested $500 million for a minority stake in Improbable, a London-based simulation and virtual reality software startup, that has few customers and little revenue.

Once considered purely theoretical, researchers have made strides in building functioning quantum computers based around a number of different designs and approaches.

International Business Machines Corp., Alphabet Inc.s Google and Rigetti Computing, a San Francisco-based quantum computing startup, have created working machines around one method, while IonQ, a spin-out from the University of Maryland and Duke University, is working on technologies based on another. Microsoft is backing a third architecture, but has yet to create a working machine.

D-Wave, a Canadian company, is the only firm to sell quantum computers today. D-Waves system is based around yet another architecture, but its machine can only solve a limited set of problems compared to those Google, IBM and the others have been working on.

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In conventional computing, information is encoded in bits that can have a value of either 0 or 1. In quantum computing, information is encoded in qubits that take advantage of quantum mechanical principals such as superposition, which allows the qubit to be both 0 and 1 simultaneously. In theory, a quantum computer could tackle complex problems in seconds or minutes that would take a conventional supercomputer many hours or days to complete.

Nyatta compared what needed to happen in quantum computing to what has happened in genomics, where Illumina Inc.s gene sequencing technology has become the technology around which an entire ecosystem of companies has been built, or what has happened in artificial intelligence, where Nvidia Corps graphics processors have become the preferred hardware on which to run neural networks.

We are happy to do it alone and at massive size to facilitate the future, Nyatta said, speaking of SoftBanks approach to investing in these frontier technologies.

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SoftBank's $100 Billion Vision Fund Eyes Quantum Computing - Bloomberg

A few yards from the stockpile of La Croix in the warehouse space behind startup Rigetti Computing s offices in Fremont, California, sits a machine like a steampunk illustration made real. Its steel chambers are studded with bolts, handles, and circular ports. But this monster is powered by electricity, not coal, and evaporates aluminum, not waterit makes superconducting electronics. Rigetti is using the machine and millions of dollars worth of other equipment housed here in hermetically sealed glass lab spaces to try and build a new kind of super-powerful computer that runs on quantum physics.

Its hardly alone in such an undertaking, though it is the underdog: Rigetti is racing against similar projects at Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Intel. Every Bay Area startup will tell you it is doing something momentously difficult, but Rigetti is biting off more than most it's working on quantum computing. All venture-backed startups face the challenge of building a business, but this one has to do it by making progress on one of tech's thorniest problems.

An 8-qubit quantum processor built by Rigetti Computing.

RIGETTI COMPUTING

Rigetti, which has 80 employees, has raised nearly $70 million to develop quantum computers, which by encoding data into the physics apparent only at tiny scales should offer a, well, quantum leap in computing power . This is going to be a very large industryevery major organization in the world will have to have a strategy for how to use this technology, says Chad Rigetti, the companys founder. The strapping 38-year-old physics PhD worked on quantum hardware at Yale and IBM before founding his own company in 2013 and taking it through the Y Combinator incubator better known for software startups like Dropbox.

No company is yet very close to offering up a quantum computer ready to do useful work existing computers can't. But Google has pledged to commercialize the technology within five years. IBM offers a cloud platform intended as a warmup for a future commercial service that lets developers and researchers play with a prototype chip located in Big Blues labs. After a few years of mostly staying quiet, Rigetti is now entering the fray. The company on Tuesday launched its own cloud platform, called Forest, where developers can write code for simulated quantum computers, and some partners get to access the startup's existing quantum hardware. Rigetti gave WIRED a peek at the new manufacturing facility in Fremontgrandly dubbed Fab-1that just started making chips for testing at the company's headquarters in Berkeley.

The startup's founder, who has a rare fluency in both quantum information theory and Silicon Valley business-speak, says that being smaller than its giant competitors gives his company an advantage. Were pursuing this long-term objective with the urgency and product clarity of a startup, says Rigetti. That's something that large corporations arent culturally matched to do. The urgency is existential: Google's effort is a hunt for a new line of business; Rigetti's a quest to have one at all.

A silicon wafer of future quantum processors.

RIGETTI COMPUTING

At very small scales, different rules to those of our everyday reality become apparent. Particles can pull weird tricks, like kinda, sorta, doing two different things at the same time. Many millions are being sunk into quantum computing R&D because information encoded into quantum effects can do weird things, too. For certain problems, that should allow a quantum chip the size of your palm to provide more computing power than a team of giant supercomputers. Rigettilike Google, IBM, and Intelpreaches the idea that this advance will bring about a wild new phase of the cloud computing revolution. Data centers stuffed with quantum processors will be rented out to companies freed to design chemical processes and drugs more quickly, or deploy powerful new forms of machine learning.

But for now, the quantum computing chips in existence are too small to do things conventional computers can't. IBM recently announced one with 16 qubitsthe components needed to build a quantum computerand Google is gunning for around 50 qubits this year. Rigetti has made chips with 8 qubits; it says the new fab will speed up the experimentation needed to increase that number. No one knows for sure, but its estimated youd need hundreds of qubits or more to do useful work on chemistry problems, which seem to be the lowest-hanging fruit for quantum computers.

Rigettis new cloud platform, Forest, is supposed to put the time it will take to get to that point to good use. The idea is to prime the pump, getting coders to practice writing programs for quantum processors now so they're ready to release killer apps when the technology becomes practical. Forest is designed to support programs that use a quantum processor to give new powers to conventional software, a bit like a computer might have a graphics card, a hybrid model Rigetti claims will be vital to making the technology practical. The platform allows coders to write quantum algorithms for a simulation of a quantum chip with 36 qubits. Select partners can access Rigetti's early quantum chips through Forest today, similar to how IBM has put its own quantum chips online.

All that might sound like Apple deciding to open the App Store before the iPhone even existed, but Rigetti argues that with a technology this different, people will need plenty of time to adjust. Building a community of people who understand and know how to use the hardware is just as important as the hardware itself to have a successful product, says Andrew Bestwick, the company's director of engineering.

Quantum equipment at Rigetti Computings Berkeley, California, office.

RIGETTI COMPUTING

Rigetti will need time, more money, and some hard science to get to that successful product. There has been a genuine acceleration of progress on quantum hardware recently, says Michael Biercuk , a professor who works on quantum computing at the University of Sydney, and previously advised DARPA on the technology. But theres still a lot to be figured out. The entry of commercial players and startups has not changed the fundamental challenges in the field, he says. One of the most difficult is getting qubits to work reliably when packed together into larger groups, says Biercuk. Quantum states are very delicate, and making qubits less flaky at holding onto information they encode is a major preoccupation for researchers in the field.

Despite all the confident talk of products and future customers, Rigettis founder doesnt dodge when asked about the challenges. No-ones built this technology before and so as a field, and community, and company we just don't know how long things are going to take, he says.

Vijay Pande, a general partner with venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz who led the firms investment in Rigetti, says he isnt worried. He sees the startup bringing in some revenue even before its chips are ready to do real work, because some organizations and companies will pay to access them for R&D purposes. Rigetti is already talking to NASA, which believes quantum computers could help plan missions more efficiently, for example. And besides, this startup isn't held to the same standards as one building a consumer mobile app. This is old school, classic venture capital, with a high upside, says Pande. Its part of Silicon Valleys own laws of physics. When theres a really big potential payoff dangling somewhere up ahead, different rules apply.

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The Quantum Computer Factory That's Taking on Google and IBM ... - WIRED

USC has been selected to lead a consortium of universities and private companies to build quantum computers that are at least 10,000 times faster than the best state-of-the-art classical computers.

USC will lead the effort among various universities and private contractors to design, build and test 100 qubit quantum machines. Such high-powered machines could help facilitate the solution of some of the most difficult optimization problems such as machine learning for image recognition, resolving scheduling conflicts in events with many participants, as well as sampling for improved prediction of random events. Pending continued success, theIntelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)contract is worth up to $45 million in funding.

The effort includes the USC Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, and the Center for Quantum Computing at the Information Sciences Institute, a unit of the Viterbi School. Quantum computing expert Daniel Lidar, director of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology and the Viterbi Professor of Engineering, will serve as the principal investigator of the multi-institutional effort and Professor Stephen Crago of the Information Sciences Institute will serve as the program/technical manager.

This project has the potential to reshape the landscape of quantum computing.

Daniel Lidar

This project has the potential to reshape the landscape of quantum computing, and I could not have asked for a better team to pursue this exciting goal, Lidar said.

Prem Natarajan, the Michael Keston Executive Director of the Information Sciences Institute, said IARPAs Quantum Enhanced Optimization programpromises to propel the U.S. into a clear leadership position in the worldwide race to develop a quantum computer at scale.

Other institutions participating in the five-year research initiative are: theMassachusetts Institute of Technology; Caltech; Harvard University; University of California, Berkeley; University College London; University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada; Saarland University, Saarland, Germany; Tokyo Institute of Technology; Lockheed Martin; and Northrop Grumman. MIT Lincoln Labs will provide government furnished capability, while NASA Ames and Texas A&M University will serve as government test and evaluation teams.

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USC to lead project to build super-speedy quantum computers - USC News

Newswise Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has selected the University of Southern California to lead a consortium of universities and private companies to build quantum computers that are at least 10,000 times faster than the best state-of-the-art classical computers.

USC will lead the effort among various universities and private contractors to design, build and test 100 qubit quantum machines. Such high-powered machines could help facilitate the solution of some of the most difficult optimization problems such as machine learning for image recognition, resolving scheduling conflicts in events with many participants, as well as sampling for improved prediction of random events. Pending continued success, the contract is worth up to $45 million in funding.

At USC, the effort includes the USC Center for Quantum Information Science and Technology in the Viterbi School of Engineering, and the Center for Quantum Computing at the Information Sciences Institute, a unit of the Viterbi School. Quantum computing expert Daniel Lidar, director of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology and the Viterbi Professor of Engineering, will serve as the Principal Investigator of the multi-institutional effort and Professor Stephen Crago of the Information Sciences Institute will serve as the Program/Technical Manager.

The consortium will focus on the design and testing of algorithms and new hardware. They will develop the computational framework and design quantum annealers, which are the specialized processors behind quantum optimization. The researchers will design ways to connect the building blocks of quantum annealers--qubits or the basic units in quantum computing that hold bits of information and the couplers, which connect the qubits to one another. The team aims to design multi-qubit couplers to allow for various configurations that will enable faster paced calculations. Government partner MIT Lincoln Labs will fabricate the hardware designed by the USC-led consortium.

The teams goal is to build quantum annealers that allow for what quantum computing researchers call high coherence or long coherence time so that the qubits behave in a quantum fashion for long periods of time. This would mean that qubits can sustain quantum states like superposition, when they are simultaneously in two or more states.

We are enormously gratified to have been selected by IARPA to lead the development of a new generation of quantum annealers for enhanced quantum optimization. This project has the potential to reshape the landscape of quantum computing, and I could not have asked for a better team to pursue this exciting goal, said Lidar.

IARPAs QEO program promises to propel the US into a clear leadership position in the worldwide race to develop a quantum computer at scale. We are fortunate to have a scientific leader of Dr. Lidars caliber and accomplishment. We are grateful to IARPA for their investment in our team and we look forward to redeeming QEOs promise in full measure, said Prem Natarajan, The Michael Keston Executive Director of the Information Sciences Institute.

The following institutions will be part of the five-year research initiative: MIT, Caltech, Harvard, UC Berkeley, University College London, University of Waterloo, Saarland University, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. MIT Lincoln Labs will provide government furnished capability, while NASA Ames and Texas A&M will serve as government test and evaluation teams.

USC Viterbi School of Engineering

Engineering Studies began at the University of Southern California in 1905. Nearly a century later, the Viterbi School of Engineering received a naming gift in 2004 from alumnus Andrew J. Viterbi, inventor of the Viterbi algorithm that is now key to cell phone technology and numerous data applications. One of the schools guiding principles is engineering +, a term coined by current DeanYannisC.Yortsos, to use the power of engineering to address the worlds greatest challenges. USC Viterbi is ranked among the top graduate programs in the world and enrolls more than 6,500 undergraduate and graduate students taught by 185 tenured and tenure-track faculty, with 73 endowed chairs and professorships. http://viterbi.usc.edu/

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USC to Lead IARPA Quantum Computing Project - Newswise (press release)