IBM Sees Path to 4,000-plus qubits
IBM Unveils New Roadmap to Practical Quantum Computing Era
Hey Guys,
This week IBM did some major PR that is worth covering in the grand scheme of things.
Plans to Deliver 4,000+ Qubit System
• Orchestrated by intelligent software, new modular and networked processors to tap strengths of quantum and classical to reach near-term Quantum Advantage.
• Qiskit Runtime to broadly increase accessibility, simplicity, and power of quantum computing for developers.
• Ability to scale, without compromising speed and quality, will lay groundwork for quantum-centric supercomputers.
• Leading Quantum-Safe capabilities to protect today’s enterprise data from ‘harvest now, decrypt later’ attacks.
In some ways IBM is anticipating a world where we could enter an ‘era of quantum-centric supercomputing’. IBM has been doing some interesting things with Red Hat and have long been interested in quantum computing.
Two years after unveiling its quantum roadmap, IBM is keeping pace with its goals, the company said Tuesday -- and it has new plans to deliver a 4,000+ qubit quantum computer by 2025.
IBM has about 1.7% of the public cloud marketplace. It’s often heralded things like Watson or its Quantum computing strategy as the future. Most of us for this reason, don’t take it too seriously.
IBM is a Quantum Computing Leader
But let’s be fair, IBM has a solid track record in quantum computing already. Back in 2020, IBM said it would deliver a 1,121-qubit device in 2023, as well as components and cooling systems.
The company also released images of a 6-foot wide and 12-foot high cooling system being built to house a 1,121-qubit processor called IBM Quantum Condor. According to IBM, the goal is to build a million-qubit quantum system. The company said it views the 1,000-qubit mark as a tipping point to overcome the hurdles limiting the commercialization of quantum systems.
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Before it sets about building the biggest quantum computer to date, IBM plans release its 433-qubit Osprey chip later this year and migrate the Qiskit Runtime to the cloud in 2023, “bringing a serverless approach into the core quantum software stack,” per Wednesday’s release.
Companies for years have touted quantum computing’s potential, with little to show for it beyond error-prone machines and basic applications with early clients. IBM’s include Exxon Mobil Corp and Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corp.
IBM unfortuantely has a vague way of stating its goals when it says:
This roadmap details plans for new modular architectures and networking that will allow IBM quantum systems to have larger qubit-counts – up to hundreds of thousands of qubits. To enable them with the speed and quality necessary for practical quantum computing, IBM plans to continue building an increasingly intelligent software orchestration layer to efficiently distribute workloads and abstract away infrastructure challenges. [read their blog here]
However in the hybrid-cloud and with Quantum computing, IBM is indeed in a unique position. A hybrid cloud is where you opt to use a mix of both public and private cloud solutions.
IBM expects a quantum machine in 2025 with thousands of qubits will at least begin to open practical and commercial opportunities. With a solid three years, who knows where we’ll be but it’s going to get interesting fast.
IBM is not alone in its chase. Governments and companies globally will invest nearly $16.4 billion in quantum development by the end of 2027, according to market research company IDC.
The company uses the term “Serverless Quantum” to describe an architecture that deploys an infrastructure that assigns work to processors of either the classical or quantum variety. I like how IBM has its own terminology, and master-plan to how it could augment the Cloud for its customers.
IBM’s work to usher in an era of practical quantum computing will leverage three pillars:
robust and scalable quantum hardware;
cutting-edge quantum software to orchestrate and enable accessible and powerful quantum programs;
and a broad global ecosystem of quantum-ready organizations and communities.
This is truly a fascinating game-plan for IBM, who appears to be trying to do it all.
Various Quantum goal-posts have been set by any number of Cloud companies and Quantum computing startups. For instance, rival Alphabet Inc’s Google has aimed to develop a computer with 1,000,000 qubits by the end of this decade. Amazon.com Inc has partnered with companies such as Rigetti Computing, which expects to reach 4,000 qubits in 2026. It’s an industry race that’s on with a winner-takes-all scenario to some extent with a variety of approaches.
The next step in delivering scalable architecture will deploy short-range, chip-level couplers. These couplers will closely connect multiple chips together to effectively form a single and larger processor, and will introduce fundamental modularity that is key to scaling. This appears a sound strategy.
IBM Quantum Roadmap
IBM on Tuesday also released its annual survey on AI adoption, showing that 35% of over 7,500 surveyed businesses across five continents were using some form of the technology, up from 31% last year. IBM also likely understands that quantum computing is a bridge to a new kind of machine learning and augmented simulations.
Check out IBM’s quantum computing roadmap of 2021 here.
On the hardware front, IBM intends to introduce IBM Condor, the world’s first universal quantum processor with over 1,000 qubits.
With this new roadmap, IBM is targeting three regimes of scalability for its quantum processors to introduce a modular quantum computing stack and paradigm.
To do so, IBM has proposed quantum communication links to connect clusters together into a larger quantum system.
IBM has always been “all-in” on Quantum computing so that’s why I knew I just had to cover it. On a side note, according to IBM, the majority of scientists think artificial general intelligence won’t arrive until “the 2050-to-2075-time frame.” Indeed alright IBM.
All three of these scalability techniques will be leveraged toward IBM’s 2025 goal: a 4,000+ qubit processor built with multiple clusters of modularly scaled processors.
In tandem with hardware breakthroughs, IBM’s roadmap targets software milestones to improve error suppression and mitigation
Earlier this year, IBM launched Qiskit Runtime primitives that encapsulate common quantum hardware queries used in algorithms into easy-to-use interfaces.
In 2023, IBM plans to expand these primitives, with capabilities that allow developers to run them on parallelized quantum processors thereby speeding up the user’s application.
These primitives will fuel IBM’s target to deliver Quantum Serverless into its core software stack in 2023, to enable developers to easily tap into flexible quantum and classical resources.
All to say that IBM has really thought things through and are betting on Quantum computing moving the needle in their business model. IBM’s vision is methodical and pragmatic. IBM plans to first get sets of multiple processors to communicate with one another both in parallel and in series. This should help develop better error mitigation schemes and improve coordination between processors, both necessary components of tomorrow’s practical quantum computers.
Towards a Quantum-centric Supercomputing Era
As part of the updated roadmap, Quantum Serverless will also lay the groundwork for core functionality within IBM’s software stack to intelligently trade off and switch between elastic classical and quantum resources; forming the fabric of quantum-centric supercomputing.
IBM’s Research page in QC is worth a look here.
By 2025, we think model developers will be able to explore quantum applications in machine learning, optimization, finance, natural sciences, and beyond.” - IBM
IBM claims they have pioneering specialized hardware and building libraries of circuits to empower researchers, developers and businesses to tap into quantum as a service through the cloud, using their preferred coding language and without having to be quantum experts themselves.
By the end of 2022, IBM’s “Osprey” processor is slated for launch — it’ll have 433-qubits. Impressive stuff to say the least! Great job IBM.
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