News Brief

In March of this year, the European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) issued a call for proposals for European supercomputing centers to host the installation of a quantum computer at their facility. They have now announced a selection of six sites in the countries of Czechia, Germany, Spain, France, Italy, and Poland that will have quantum computers installed and available by the second half of 2023. The total budget for the project will be €100 Million ($97M USD) with half of the funds contributed by the European Union through the EuroHPC JU and the other half contributed by the [...]

The LabOneQ software from Zurich Instruments allows users to design and visualize complex quantum experiments with a Python based programming environment. The software makes it easier and faster for an end user to generate and upload waveforms, synchronize pulses between multiple instruments, visualize the results, verify experimental sequences and pulses before execution and track the results and calibration data. It can handle anything from a single qubit to 100 qubits or more. The software works to enable high duty cycles by minimizing communications overhead, optimizing control instructions, pipelining, queuing experiments, and utilizing automation. Additional information about LabOneQ can be seen in [...]

The purpose of the study performed by Multiverse, Protiviti, and Ally Financial was to construct a portfolio of assets that would track the returns of the Nasdaq-100 and S&P 500 indexes with a much smaller subset of assets. The research was able to accomplish this by reducing the number of assets in the new index tracking portfolios by 4x and 10x respectively. The advantage of limited the number assets, known as cardinality constraints, is that it makes the portfolio much easier to manage. The team also reported that they were able to reduce the risk profile of the target index by [...]

Calculating an optimal flight trajectory for a UAV turns out to be a complex optimization problem. But Quantum Computing Inc. (QCI) and the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC) will be working on this problem to see if a quantum approach can provide a valuable solution. Their plan is to take sensor, airspace information of other aircraft, desired destinations for the craft, and micro-weather data collected by the Virginia Flight Information Exchange (VA-FIX) in order to calculate the optimal time, speed, cost, and route for the UAV to reach its destinations. The project will be using QCI's Entropy Quantum Computing (EQC) photonics-based [...]

At the 2022 Silicon Quantum Electronics Workshop in Orford, Québec, Canada, Intel described its second generation silicon spin test chip and some results in testing it. In the chip business yield is everything and Intel announced that they achieved a yield rate of about 95% across the 300 millimeter wafer in a recent test. You might ask whether yield is really critical in a quantum processor chip. After all, these are not like microprocessors that are made in the millions per week. A company only needs to obtain a handful of chips when it wants to build up its next quantum computer. But high [...]

The two-year $400,000 grant was awarded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to fund research examining the power of quantum witnesses. The award is part of a $15 million initiative from the DOE called Exploratory Research for Extreme‐Scale Science. The principal investigator for this project will be Supartha Podder, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Sciences at Stony Brook University. In the context of this project a witness is a piece of data that certifies the answer to a computation. This research can potentially help understand when and why quantum computation outperforms traditional classical computation. Additional information about this award [...]

The IonQ contract with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is for providing access to IonQ's trapped ion quantum processor as well as the development of quantum algorithms and applications. The AFRL has been researching quantum technology for some time and currently has labs located in New York, Ohio, and New Mexico that research various areas associated with the quantum technology. You can view IonQ's announcement of this award on their website here. September 30, 2022

From left, Andrew Wilson, quantum physics division chief at NIST; Missy Diehl, director of industry relations at the University of Colorado Boulder; Rob Hays, CEO and president of Atom Computing; Colorado Governor Jared Polis; Ben Bloom, co-founder and chief technology officer at Atom; and Jonathan King, co-founder and chief scientist at Atom, cut the ribbon on Atom’s new facility in Boulder, Colorado. Credit: Atom Computing With the help of Colorado Governor Jared Polis, Atom Computing officially opened its new R&D center in Boulder, Colorado. Although the company has a facility in Berkeley, California, it decided to add to its development capabilities [...]

GSMA is a worldwide industry trade group with about 1200 members of mobile cellular network operators. As one might expect, the topic of quantum safe communication is becoming a topic of concern for them with approximately 100 Zettabytes (or 1023 bytes) of information transmitted each year and revenue in the neighborhood of $2 trillion worldwide. Data security is a priority for them so any failures that would result from a quantum computer breaking the encryption would be very serious matter. In order to mitigate the potential risks of quantum computing they have created a news Post-Quantum Telco Network Taskforce to define [...]

Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) and Cyxtera, a leading company providing data center colocation and interconnection services that has than 60 data centers in over 30 markets, have agreed to partner and install one of OQC''s superconducting processors in Cyxtera’s Reading Data Center Campus LHR3. This will enable Cyxtera's customers to utilize OQC's processor and work with classical computers located in that facility. This could potentially improve latency times and allow Cyxtera’s customers direct access to our OQC's quantum computer without going through a public cloud. Since the classical and quantum processors will be colocated rather than in separate locations, this can [...]