News Brief

Zapata Computing announced that it will be expanding its footprint with a new legal entity in the UK to supplement its existing offices in Boston, Toronto, and Tokyo. It appears that a key purpose for this expansion, besides supporting universities and enterprise customers based in the UK, is that it will allow the company to work more closely with projects restricted by export control laws or driven by the UK government. For more information, you can view Zapata's announcement of this launch in a news release located on their website here. June 1, 2021

Janssen Pharmaceuticals is a pharmaceutical company founded in 1953 and owned by the multinational Johnson & Johnson. They have developed one of the three Covid-19 vaccines approved for use in the United States. The collaboration with Qu&Co will work to develop and test novel quantum computational algorithms and software for applications in pharmaceutical R&D. The research will include the use of QUBEC, Qu&Co's platform for chemical and material science simulation. (See our article from earlier this year that provides additional information about QUBEC.) There is a growing emphasis in the pharmaceutical industry to leverage computational chemistry and artificial intelligence techniques to [...]

The new simulator, called DM1, is a specially designed quantum simulator based upon density matrices that can be used to model noise in quantum hardware. It supplements two other simulators that Amazon previously had available, the SV1 state vector simulator and the TN1 high performance tensor network simulator for structured quantum circuits. A simulator that can model noise can be very helpful for incorporating noise mitigation techniques in a quantum program so one can get more accurate results when running the program on a real quantum computer. The DM1 can simulate circuits with up to 17 qubits and run up to [...]

Two companies announced this week that they have joined the IBM Quantum Network. The first is ColdQuanta, a developer of cold atom quantum technology with headquarters in Boulder, Colorado and offices in Madison, Wisconsin and Oxford, UK. They will be integrating IBM's open source Qiskit quantum software development platform for use with ColdQuanta's upcoming "Hilbert" 100 qubit computer scheduled to be launched in the second half of this year. You can view ColdQuanta's news release with additional details here. The second is Classiq, a Tel-Aviv based company creating what they call an algorithm design platform. Their software synthesizes high-level models models [...]

Keysight Technologies has made its third acquisition in the quantum computing field by acquiring Quantum Benchmark, a company in Waterloo, Canada that specializes in providing software solutions that enable error characterization, error mitigation, error correction and performance validation for quantum computing hardware. This follows Keysights previous acquisitions of Signadyne in 2016 and Labber Quantum in 2019. (See a previous article we posted last month about Keysights's quantum activities.) The intent is to combine Keysight's existing control electronics and instrumentation solutions with Quantum Benchmark's software to provide a more complete offering for quantum hardware developers. For additional details, you can view a news release [...]

The Irish government will be investing multi-million euros to set up a National Quantum Engineering Centre at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland. The facility will have about 900 square meters of space and the investment will add 45 new quantum research positions including five new senior research leaders. Additional information is available in a news release located on Tyndall's web site here. May 19, 2021

In order to encourage more innovation in quantum information science and to help train additional members of a future quantum workforce, IonQ has announced a new program to provide free research credits for approved projects. The program is available to all graduate students, faculty, and other researchers and teachers at accredited academic institutions. The maximum amount of the award would be $10,000 with the credit usage based upon the number qubits, gates, and iterations used in each run. IonQ has provided a Resource Estimator on its website for those who want to estimate the cost. For example, a circuit with 32 [...]

D-Wave and CINECA, the Italian inter-university consortium and one of the world’s leading global supercomputing centers have announced a formal collaboration to offer Italian universities, researchers, and developers expanded access to practical quantum computing technology and resources through D-Wave’s Leap™ quantum cloud service. CINECA is an Italian consortium composed of 69 Italian Universities, 25 national research institutes and government ministries formed to support the Italian scientific community with supercomputing and scientific visualization tools. They current possess several classical supercomputers shown on the TOP500 list and have a mission to support Italy's scientific community and improve quantum computing literacy and skills training for university partners. Earlier this year CINECA [...]

A Chinese research team from the University of Science and Technology of China has developed a programmable 62 qubit superconducting processor. The qubits are arranged in an 8x8 two dimensional configuration so it appears that only 62 out of the 64 qubits were operational. The team has been able to implement what they call Quantum Walks on the processor. A paper on this development has been posted on the website of Science magazine and you can view the abstract and access the full article here. May 10, 2021