D-Wave Quantum Inc., a commercial supplier of quantum computing hardware and software, today announced the launch of its gate-model quantum computing simulator program in beta test mode, allowing customers to test error-aware programs.
The simulator is built around D-Wave’s dual-rail superconducting gate-model technology, which is designed to detect errors and correct them, allowing more efficient hardware scaling.
D-Wave offers both gate-model and annealing quantum computing systems. Gate-model quantum computers operate like traditional computers, using Boolean logic gates and allowing procedural programming. Annealing quantum computers, by contrast, manipulate energy boundaries to solve optimization problems.
Different from classical computing, gate-model quantum computing manages probability amplitudes across quantum bits and allows it to create specialized probability gates that can exist in superpositions – creating logical connections that can be 1, 0, or both 1 and 0 at the same time. It can also operate on multi-qubit gates that link multiple qubits through a phenomenon called quantum entanglement.
This architecture enables complex procedural logic systems to exist in multiple states at once before an answer is finalized. This essentially lets a quantum circuit run a calculation rapidly because it executes combinations of a program in parallel using physics.
The computer itself runs the circuit multiple times because a single run may not guarantee a correct answer, but since each run is extremely fast – much faster than a similar classical computer – the time it takes is negligible. Finally, the distribution of the answers is examined and the frequency reveals the correct solution.
Chief Executive Dr. Alan Baratz said the beta program marks a major milestone in the company’s roadmap towards advancing fault-tolerant gate-model quantum computing.
“Quantum error correction is a defining challenge in the race to commercially useful gate-model quantum computing,” Baratz said. “By giving leading organizations early access to our simulator, we’re enabling them to explore a fundamentally more efficient approach to fault tolerance and the applications we expect it will unlock.”
The company recently published a research paper in Nature demonstrating a foundational layer of the dual-rail architecture that preserves error detection. In the paper, D-Wave researchers showed how high-fidelity two-qubit entangling gates can operate with error correction.
Fault tolerance matters for quantum computers because qubits are extremely fragile and affected by “noise.” Noise can be anything from changes in the environment, such as shifts in temperature, electromagnetism, stray light particles or vibrations – anything can cause them to lose coherence or even flip information. As a result, quantum computers are built to detect and correct errors, and often to scale the number of qubits side by side so that if noise alters one qubit, its siblings remain unaffected.
Participants in the beta program included organizations spanning commercial and research outfits: Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria S.A., FirstQFM, Florida Atlantic University and the Jülich Supercomputing Centre.
“Quantum machine learning models that perform well under ideal conditions may behave very differently when exposed to realistic hardware constraints,” said FAU Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Dr. Arslan Munir. “D-Wave’s simulator will allow us to investigate how error-aware, qubit-efficient approaches could improve the robustness of quantum machine learning and help establish practical design guidelines.”