Riverlane has released its groundbreaking three-year roadmap for its Quantum Error Correction Stack, Deltaflow, starting in 2024 and culminating in a system where quantum computers can run one million (Mega) error-free Quantum Operations (QuOps) by 2026.
In August, 2024, Riverlane announced that it had raised $75 million in Series C funding to deliver its groundbreaking quantum error correction (QEC) roadmap.
Today, the world’s best quantum computers can perform at most a few hundred quantum operations before failure. This must scale to a million and, ultimately, trillions of operations to unlock the transformative real-world applications that can open a new age of human progress.
Every reliable quantum computer will need quantum error correction (QEC) to reach this point. Deltaflow provides commercial-grade quantum computers with a comprehensive, modular QEC solution, scaling as quantum computers scale and across every qubit type.
As an important near-term milestone, crossing into the MegaQuOp regime will present a pivotal moment when the power of quantum computers will surpass the reach of any classical supercomputer.
The Riverlane roadmap introduces a standard industry measure of error-free ‘quantum operations’, or QuOps. The maximum QuOp capacity is a useful measure to assess the power of a quantum computer. It will play a similar role to floating-point operations per second—or FLOPs—commonly used to rank supercomputers.
Earl Campbell, VP of quantum science at Riverlane, said: “The MegaQuOp is a critical milestone, but it’s just the first step on the journey to full fault-tolerant quantum computing. We’ll need to realise a trillion error-free operations to begin fully unlocking the higher value applications of quantum computing, but this is a critical set of milestones in that journey.”
Many companies and research groups have advanced quantum error correction. Quantinuum, ETH Zürich, Google, Harvard University, Yale University, IBM, Microsoft, Alice & Bob, and Riverlane (to name a few) have pushed the quantum error correction field further forward than anyone anticipated. But none of these demonstrations have integrated the fast, scalable real-time decoding processes needed for error-corrected quantum computation, which is exactly the problem Deltaflow will solve.
The UK government, for instance, has committed to build an accessible, UK-based quantum computer capable of running one trillion operations by 2035.
At a MegaQuOp, a quantum computer can run simulations that no supercomputer can. Will this unlock McKinsey’s predicted $1 trillion+ economic value from quantum computing? No, not yet.
It’s hard to say for sure what applications we’ll unlock at the MegaQuOp until such a system is in the hands of innovators. But what’s undeniable is the industry can’t push toward Giga and, ultimately, TeraQuOp systems without first reaching the MegaQuOp threshold.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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