D-Wave Quantum Inc. has launched a new hybrid quantum solver for nonlinear programs. The solver, available through D-Wave’s Leap™ quantum cloud service, supports up to two million variables and constraints. It excels at handling nonlinear relationships, making it suitable for real-world problems with complex interactions between variables.

This new solver will join three other solvers in D-Wave’s portfolio to help users submit a problem. Each of the solvers has a strength in different types of problems and which one a user will use depends upon their specific problem. The other solvers that D-Wave has available in its Leap Cloud Service include the following:

  • BQM (Binary Quadratic Models) – Only uses Binary Variables (O or 1) and does not support specification of any constraints to the solution
  • DQM (Discrete Quadratic Models) – Uses discrete variables (Integers or a specific set of choices for the variable) and does not support constraints.
  • CQM (Constrained Quantum Models) – Supports binary, discrete, and continuous variables and also supports specifying constraints to the solution

Use cases include workforce scheduling, production scheduling, and logistics routing. D-Wave aims to boost time-to-solution for organizations optimizing operational processes and performance. Customer adoption of D-Wave’s hybrid solvers has nearly doubled over the past year, highlighting the growing demand for quantum optimization technology.

It is important to note that providing a complete optimization solution for an end user is more than just picking a good algorithm. Having good front end software that subject matter experts can use without learning complex quantum programming is very important. Real world customers require support for such issues a constraint handling or support for discrete or continuous variables rather than just binary variables. D-Wave has made significant investments over the years in developing more and more sophisticated hybrid solvers that addresses many of these concerns. They have also work to achieve better times to solutions in successive versions of their solvers. (We had published last year a previous article on the Quantum Computing Report about an enhanced release of their Constrained Quadratic Model (CQM) Hybrid Solver.) So this new hybrid solver is their latest release in the lineup of various solvers they have made available.

D-Wave introduced this new solver at their Qubits 2024 conferences this week and it is available now through D-Wave’s Leap™ quantum cloud service. The company has also posted a press release announcing this software that can be accessed on their website here.

June 17, 2024