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A Canadian quantum computing firm D-Wave announced on Tuesday it is commercialising its next-generation system Advantage, built for businesses.
The company’s computer is already being used, via its cloud, by some corporations to build and run applications for their operations.
D-Wave is taking another step, and making Advantage generally available to other businesses through its cloud platform Leap. The system is made of more than 5000 qubits, which is more than double the count of processing units in its earlier D-Wave's 2000Q machine.
(Qubit are processing units in a quantum system, just like bits are in a conventional computer.)
Each of these qubits will connect with 15 others, increasing the connectivity by two and half times its predecessor’s. For quantum programmers, more qubits and richer connections mean larger, denser and more powerful graph for building commercial applications.
“Today’s general availability of Advantage delivers the first quantum system built specifically for business, and marks the expansion into production scale commercial applications and new problem types with our hybrid solver services,” D-Wave’s CEO Alan Baratz said in a statement.
D-Wave’s new hybrid solver gives application developers the ability to switch from binary variables, like 0 or 1, to a quadratic model, like red, yellow, and blue. This allows them to expand the kind of problems they can run on a quantum system. The quadratic model will be commercially available from October 8, the company said.
D-Wave’s partners and business customers are using Advantage to determine protein structures, solve grocery optimisation problem, optimise trade and currency arbitrage, and build paint shop scheduling applications.
With up to a million variables, coupled with the new topology and increased processing power, the new 5000-qubit quantum computer will allow developers to directly run more complex problems on quantum processing unit (QPU).
D-Wave says that Advantage’s QPU can find optimal solutions 10 to 30 times faster in some cases, and improve the quality of output, compared to the 2000Q computer.
The company’s next-gen hybrid solver and quadratic model are available on its cloud service.
D-Wave recently, in July, launched its cloud service in India for developers to access its 2000Q quantum computer and run real-time in-production hybrid applications.