IBM ups pressure with super computer

IBM is increasing the pressure on Google in the battle to commercialize quantum computing technology.

Quantum computers hold the promise of being able to solve difficult problems from fields such as chemistry and material science that are currently beyond the reach of the most powerful conventional supercomputers. They may also one day render some current encryption techniques obsolete.

IBM said Friday it has created a prototype 50 qubit quantum computer. A machine this size is believed to be close to the threshold at which it could perform tasks beyond the reach of conventional supercomputers — a major milestone in computer science that researchers in the field refer to as “quantum supremacy.”

In a statement, IBM said it “aims to demonstrate capabilities beyond today’s classical systems” with quantum systems this size.

Friday’s announcement puts IBM in a neck-and-neck race with Google, which has said that it plans to show a similarly sized machine capable of achieving this milestone by the end of the year.

Today’s quantum computers remain too small and too errorprone to outperform conventional supercomputers at most tasks, but the technology is advancing rapidly. A number of companies — including IBM, Google, Microsoft, Canada’s D-Wave Systems Inc. — are pushing to create machines that businesses can use.

The Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo also is a leader in quantum computing research.

Jonathan Breeze, a research fellow working on advanced materials at Imperial College London and not affiliated with any of the companies developing quantum computing, said that practical applications of quantum computers will depend largely on being able to reduce the error-rate in their calculations.

“There is much debate about how errors scale with the number of qubits,” Breeze said. If errors grow exponentially as more qubits are added, as some suspect, then the technology may fall far short of expectations. “The exciting thing is that the technology is now developing at such a rapid rate that we should be able to answer that question soon,” Breeze said.

While IBM and its rivals are keen to lead the breakthroughs in quantum computing, they are also increasingly eager to win over new customers. Google has offered science labs and artificial intelligence researchers early access to its quantum machines.

IBM said Friday it’s making a 20 qubit quantum computer available to paying customers through its cloud computing platform by the end of 2017.