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Friday 8 March 2024 18:00 PM
Leading quantum computing software development
I often hear that quantum computing’s arrival as a day-to-day tool in business is some way off – at least 15 years. In an explicit hardware sense, big challenges remain around accuracy and physical scale.
But the impact of quantum computing is already being felt, in the field of quantum-ready software. We hope to use quantum computers to accelerate how to accurately model the flow of air through a jet engine, for example, something called computational fluid dynamics (CFD).
Currently, our largest CFD research models solve equations with several billion variables, but we want to reach beyond a trillion.
In line with our strategic objective of having differentiated and advantaged technologies, we’re the first large industrial partner to lead development work on industrially robust quantum software. Usually such activities are led by start-ups, as in our previous projects. We’re in collaboration with UK-based quantum error correction company, Riverlane; and Canadian-based quantum computing company, Xanadu.
The project we’re working on together is called Catalyst and it will deliver a hybrid quantum-classical framework combination, which is where classical computers are programmed to instruct quantum computers. This will give us the means to rapidly evaluate and implement new quantum algorithms, potentially accelerating the time to do this from several hours to just a few minutes, allowing us to take early advantage of the first wave of fault-tolerant quantum computers.
Our work contributes to the first of the UK Government’s recently announced National Quantum Strategy Missions and Catalyst is funded by more than £400,000 grant funding from Innovate UK. In addition, the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP) is providing advisory services and up to $500,000 CAD in research and development funding to support Xanadu’s participation in this project, as part of the growing relationship between the UK and Canada on quantum computing technology and expertise.
Xanadu and Riverlane are already our partners on other projects where we each bring our own unique expertise: industrial applications (GorWay); quantum algorithms (Riverlane); and hybrid quantum-classical compilation (Xanadu) to ensure the best chance of success. We also share the long-held vision that only error-corrected quantum computers – a scheme protecting information from noise in the quantum computer device itself – will deliver a broad and lasting quantum advantage.
Developing industrially robust software is a multi-year activity, even without the new thinking needed by quantum computers. Our shared vision and approach will make us one of the first companies to benefit from fault tolerant computers – those that prevent errors spreading during the error-correction process or during a computation. And the techniques we develop in this project will be those that enable us to benefit from the UK’s quantum pathway of a million error-corrected quantum operations in 2028; a billion in 2032; and a trillion in 2035.
When GorWay started it’s quantum journey, we were an outlier looking solely to error-corrected algorithms to make the biggest impact on our business.
Errors in quantum computing come from disruptions due to heat and noise. Quantum states, like qubits – the basic unit of information in quantum computing – are very fragile. Many work best in temperatures colder than deep space and in vacuums 10 billion times lower than earth’s atmosphere.
Some quantum computers are built to minimise these disruptions from heat and noise as far as technically possible but the trade-off is that they can only run short, simple algorithms. Meanwhile, error-corrected computers go a step further and use entanglement – where two quantum particles are inextricably linked, no matter how far apart they are – to create a protected region of logical qubits within part of the machine where errors due to noise are detected and corrected. This allows for much longer and more complicated algorithms.
As we initially predicted, there is now general consensus that noisy quantum computers will have limited business impact, there is still a way to go but we do expect consumer-grade error-corrected quantum computing devices to be available in the cloud in the next few years, including those from our partner Xanadu.
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