Quantum Thoughts on a "Virtuous cycle" to evolve the Technology

Our Vision at Dell Technologies is that Quantum Technologies are accelerating at an extraordinary pace and in particular Quantum Computing

We believe that there are a number of areas of Quantum Technology that are evolving and maturing including Cryptography, Sensors, simulation and indeed Computing and we have Research and development as well as commercial focus on all of these, as well as Post Quantum Applications.

 From the computing perspective, this is the mainstay of our commercial focus and we are interested in the relationship that we believe must exist between “Classical Computing” and “Quantum Computers”

Simply put, Classical computers are Base2 or Binary in that they operate on the basis of 0 and 1 – Quantum computers talk a different language altogether, as they deal with Quantum or “Q Bits” and so Humans need Classical compute architecture in order to understand what the QBits are saying. This creates the need for “Hybridity” between the two systems, and this is what Dell together with industry partners such as IBM, Nvidia and IONQ have created together, a Hybrid Quantum System”.  

To understand truly where we are and where were going though, it’s always a good exercise to look at where we’ve come from.

This gives us an insight into the ongoing evolution of Technology and what we can expect moving into the future.

Like all usable Technology of course, Compute Technology requires an ecosystem – Traditional compute Technology brought us the semiconductor whose predictive performance and evolution was based on Moore’s law, which of course resulted from a virtuous cycle – I believe that as we move through time Quantum will require a similar virtuous cycle

So what do we know at this point?

Well we know that every “virtuous Cycle” or evolution of Technology requires a “Commercial application” or need for it to exist. To understand Quantum’s place in this, we observe the evolution or history of Computing Technology over time.

 Firstly we had the age of Mechanical Compute – Differential Adder = Automotive

Then came Vacuum Tube Compute - Roger’s Additron = Vacuum Tube Manufacturing

We now have Semiconductor Compute - Full Adder = Semiconductor Fab Manufacturing

And then comes Quantum Compute - Trapped Ion Qubits

A virtuous enablement cycle has not yet formed for Quantum Computing so as an industry or collective we need to find a commercial application of Quantum Computing that has the correct balance of scale and fault tolerance. We need to demonstrate Quantum Advantage; Find a task that it can compute but that is difficult for a classical computer and demonstrate Commercial Utility; Identify a useful task that a noisy intermediate-scale quantum computer can carry out more efficiently than a classical computer

Our view is that Quantum simulation is an important enabling technology in all of this and we have developed the Hardware on the Classical or HPC side and the Software on the Quantum simulation side to advance this and give industry the opportunity to springboard from Classical to Quantum computing using Tools and Frameworks that we all understand and that can be applied to problem solving for some of the most critical and complex, even “wicked” problems of our time  #iwork4dell #quantum #ionq