dougfinke

Chris Bates has joined SandboxAQ as their first Chief Information Security Officer (CISO). He joined the company from Sentinel One where he was the Chief Security & Trust Office where he was responsible for all security aspects among many other things. Previous to that he held positions at Nike, Fidelis Cybersecurity (General Dynamics), NuScale Power, and ACS (Xerox), and consulted for RSA (EMC). At SandboxAQ he will be responsible for the ensuring the security of the company's data, communications, and intellictual property and also to help advance the company's AQtive Guard cryptography platform with SandboxAQ's client base. A press release announcing his [...]

The U.S. government issues yearly SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) and STTR (Small Business Technology Transfer) awards to various new technology projects. The nickname they give this program is "America's Seed Fund". Phase I awards are in the amounts of $50,000 to $275,000 for projects with a 6-12 month timeframe. Phase II awards will be in an amount between $400,000 to $1.8 million for projects that last 24 months. The difference between the SBIR and the STTR is that STTR awards require the recipient to partner with an academic institution. The Department of Energy recently made several Phase II awards for [...]

IBM has announced the the Japanese research institute Riken has chosen to install an IBM Quantum System Two processor to be installed at its facility and integrated with Riken's Fugaku supercomputer. The system that will be installed is IBM's latest generation Heron processor which contains 133 qubits and offers a considerable improvement in qubit quality metrics over their earlier systems. It will be the only quantum computer co-located with Fugaku when it is installed. Although IBM has installed other on-premise quantum computers at both the Cleveland Clinic as well as the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), this deal is different in two [...]

QuEra Computing announced it has received a contract from  Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) to install one of QuEra's neutral atom processor at the institute's Global Research and Development Center for Business by Quantum-AI Technology (G-QuAT) in Tsukuba, Japan. This will be QuEra's second deal to install an on-premise machine at a customer site. They will also be providing a quantum testbed to the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) national quantum program. G-QuAT is the same R&D center that we described last month that will be installing 2000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs for large scale emulation of quantum [...]

The $940 million AUD funding will be provided by the Australian Commonwealth and Queensland Governments, split equally, through a financial package, comprised of equity, grants, and loans. The processor is expected to contain at least 1 million physical qubits, include fault tolerance and will be installed at a location near Brisbane Airport in Brisbane, Australia. PsiQuantum has been developing a photonics based machine using is fusion based architecture for several years. The Quantum Computing Report previously published an overview of their architecture in 2022 and the company has just released a pre-print on arXiv that provides additional detail. Although the planned [...]

Chart Showing the Possible Evolution of Quantum Threats. Source: GQI's State of Play Presentation There was a recent flurry of concern over the strength of the Lattice based encryption algorithms approved by NIST due to a paper titled Quantum Algorithms for Lattice Problems published earlier this month by Yilei Chen, a professor at the Tsinghua University Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Science (IIIS). Two algorithms this would possibly have affected include ML-KEM (CRYSTALS-Kyber) and ML-DSA (CRYSTALS-Dilithium) which use an LWE (Learning with Errors) approach. These algorithms are based upon the computationally hard problems of determining the length of the shortest nonzero vector [...]

Diagram of Horizon's Triple Alpha web-based IDE and compiler suite from along with backend server, integrated with Rigetti's Novera™ quantum processor and Quantum Machine's OPX1000, processor-based quantum controller. Credit: Horizon Quantum Computing It's no secret that the best way to achieve maximum performance from a quantum system is to establish a very tight integration between the hardware and software stacks. This allows the software to take advantage of all the idiosyncrasies in the hardware to obtain every ounce of performance that it can. And achieving this maximum performance is surely needed as the industry races to achieve systems that can provide [...]

Progression of Quantuum's Improvements in Quantum Volume Performance. Credit: Quantinuum Quantinuum has always had a strategy of providing users with qubits that demonstrated the highest possible measure of qubit quality, as measured by both gate fidelity metrics as well as the Quantum Volume measure originally proposed by IBM. In fact, in 2020, they declared a goal of continuing to improve the Quantum Volume measure of their machines by a factor of 10X each year. And to their credit, they have continued to meet or beat this goal every year. Now, they have reached a new level of qubit quality performance on [...]

How to Celebrate a Hundred Years of Quantum Mechanics Bard Professor Paul Cadden-Zimansky wants everyone from kindergarteners to CEOs to celebrate the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology in 2025. One of his goals for the initiative is to illustrate the many pathways to jobs in science and technology. He shares his own story that includes both a C in high school physics and a successful career as a professor and superconductivity researcher. Paul Cadden-Zimansky is an associate professor of physics and director of the Physics Program at Bard College. A condensed matter physicist, Paul earned his Ph.D. from Northwestern [...]