All Major Industrial Countries Need to Get Their Own QuEra Quantum Computers

QuEra has sold another neutral atom quantum computer to a national agency. This one is in Japan. QuEra previously had a sale to the UK.

QuEra Computing has a 6.5 Billion JPY contract (approx. $41M USD) from Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) to deliver a state-of-the-art quantum computer, advancing quantum capabilities in Japan. This computer will be installed on-premises alongside the NVIDIA-powered ABCI-Q supercomputer.

This strategic initiative aims to develop a powerful hybrid quantum-classical computing platform, where QuEra’s unique quantum computing technology complements AIST’s ABCI-Q supercomputer with the ultimate goal of creating a hybrid platform for high-fidelity simulations and quantum AI applications.

Hybrid classical and quantum computers are needed because each is better at different things. The systems will split up the tasks for complex problems and only use the quantum computers for the large combinatorial sections. The sections of a problem that a regular computer can solve quickly do not need quantum acceleration.

Amazon Bracket is a cloud system that provides access to quantum computers like QuEra.

QuEra quantum computers will grow in capability and will be able to solve certain problems like optimization, classification and certain kinds of machine learning and logistics problems better than regular computers.

The Australian military was already testing quantum computers for optimizing the loading of trucks and ships. These kinds of problems will need to have onsite computers and rapid reliable responses. The Amazon Bracket system once had a 10 hour job from BMW. This meant all of the other problems had to wait until the BMW task was completed.

The future will see multiple quantum systems to prevent backlogs waiting for timesharing of a few quantum computers. As the commercial relavence is achieved, then long delays will not be acceptable.

For now, more and more national labs and major institutions are getting their own quantum computers. In a few years, every department and company could need their own.

QuEra’s neutral atom quantum computer does not need the extreme cooling of other systems. There can be miniaturization of the system so that they can be as convenient as any rack server.

QuEra’s gate-based neutral-atom quantum computers are known for their unique scale, fidelity, and upcoming quantum error detection and correction abilities. Neutral-atom computers are a highly-promising quantum modality, offering a clear path to large-scale, fault-tolerant computers. QuEra leads the neutral-atom market, offering dynamic qubit manipulation (qubit shuttling), enabling flexible and efficient quantum computations. QuEra’s computers operate at room temperature and can readily integrate with classical computing infrastructure.

In 2023, Nextbigfuture covered QuEra’s huge announcement of major progress with error correction. Error correction is how quantum computers will get to massive scale and become far better than regular computers.

Microsoft has a research paper about the resources needed for different quantum computer applications. It is not just the number of logical error corrected qubits but also how many operations (circuit depth) that can be achieved. Performing over 6000 steps is the level needed for certain early commercially valuable logistics and supply chain problems.

Quantum error correction is critical to fulfill the immense promise of quantum computers.

Microsoft Defined Three Levels of Quantum Computer Implementation

Level 1: Foundational quantum computing: Today’s Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum (NISQ) computers use noisy physical qubits as their computational units. While such quantum systems are valuable from a scientific point of view, they are not be able to solve commercially relevant problems in a manner that is more efficient than what we can do with classical computers. The reason for this inability lies with the experimental fact that physical noise rates will prevent NISQ circuits from computing beyond, at most, a few thousand quantum gates.

Level 2: Resilient quantum computing: We speak of resilient quantum computing when we are able to implement a logical qubit whose reliability exceeds the physical error rates of its components. Such logical qubits use quantum error correction on a multitude of physical qubits per logical qubit.

Level 3: Scalable quantum computing: With enough reliable qubits and an appropriate logical clock speed we reach the third level of quantum computing at scale. It is at this level that we have a quantum supercomputer that gives us a quantum advantage over classical computers for commercially valuable problems.

To outperform classical computation for practical applications, we need the capability to reliably execute algorithms with 10^12 quantum gates or more. Moreover, for the quantum computation to provide the solution within a practical amount of time, say within 10^6 seconds, we also have to
take into account the logical clock speed of the quantum computers, which can vary by several orders of magnitude depending on the quantum technology being used. It is only with the right combination of reliable and fast enough quantum hardware, quantum error correction, and quantum software that we will be able to achieve a quantum advantage over classical computing.

A Three-Year Quantum Error-Correction Roadmap – to Level 2 by 2026 and on Track to Level 3

QuEra’s roadmap outlines a three-phase release of its revolutionary quantum computers:
• 2024: Launching a quantum computer with 10 logical qubits, unique transversal gate capability, and over 256 physical qubits. Transversal gates are crucial in quantum computing for their ability to prevent error propagation across qubits, making them inherently error-resistant. They simplify quantum error correction by allowing errors to be corrected independently for each qubit. This system establishes the groundwork for error-corrected quantum compuAng. In addition, to assist in assessing and preparing algorithms for the era of error correcAon, QuEra will release a cloud-based logical qubit simulator in the first half of 2024.

• 2025: an enhanced model with 30 logical error-corrected qubits with magic state distillation, supported by over 3000 physical qubits. Magic state distillation enables the implementation of a broader range of quantum gates with higher fidelity, allowing for the execution of non-Clifford gates, which are crucial for universal quantum.

• 2026: Introduction of a third-generation QEC model with 100 logical qubits and over 10,000 physical qubits. This development, capable of deep logical circuits, will push quantum computing beyond the simulatability limit, ushering in a new era of discovery and innovation.

These advancements build upon the recent breakthrough published in Nature (“Logical quantum processor based on reconfigurable atom arrays“, Bluvstein (Harvard) et al., Nature 2023), where a Harvard-led group, together with QuEra, MIT, NIST and the University of Maryland, reported the execution of complex algorithms with 48 logical qubits.