Quantum Computing now becomes one of the interesting research areas of tech giants. Google, Microsoft, IBM — all are working on the development of their own Quantum Computers. And still, we didn’t have a real Quantum Computer to show their superiority over conventional machines.
But things are going to change in coming years, recently IBM Quantum Computer succeeded in achieving a task previously thought to be impossible.
As you know, Quantum Computers can solve complex problems that are impossible to the existing classical computers. But the problem-solving mechanism comes with a price — a huge processing memory. And the Quantum Computing supremacy is believed to be limited at about 49-qubits due to memory limitations.
Since Google researchers are appeared to be top in the race for a 49-qubit machine. After Google, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich is in the second position with a 45-qubit simulation which they acquired by using 500 terabytes of memory.
But now IBM Quantum Computer outranked all by attaining 56-qubits Quantum Computing supremacy which simulated with only 4.5 terabytes of memory. The simulation is based on a mathematical trick where the operations are divided into what they call “embarrassingly parallel” chunks, allowing researchers to access many processors of a supercomputer simultaneously.
According to the principal investigator of the IBM study, Robert L. (Bob) Wisnieff, current simulation runs about “a billion times slower” than the theoretical estimates for an actual 56-qubit quantum computer. Dr. Wisnieff and his team are planning to work with supercomputers to speed up the parallel computation needed for the simulation.
Dr. Wisnieff also mentioned that he hopes to check the accuracy of quantum computers against algorithms that he knows the answers, before putting real quantum computers to the test. And the main goal of IBM Quantum Computer is to explore practical problems such as quantum chemistry.
Image Credits : IBM
