Building Quantum Software and Community
Overview
In this episode of The Quantum Spin by HKA, host Veronica Combs talks with Matt Johnson, CEO and co-founder of QC Ware, a software company that builds tools for drug discovery and materials design. Matt also convenes the quantum community three times a year at Q2B conferences in Silicon Valley, Paris and Tokyo.
They discuss the groundbreaking developments announced at the December 2024 Q2B Silicon Valley conference, including Google’s new high-reliability qubit technology. The conversation also covers QC Ware’s molecular design software, Promethium, designed to expedite drug discovery through high-performance simulations. They also discuss early quantum use cases, chemistry research and the value of building a strong industry ecosystem.
00:00 Welcome to The Quantum Spin
00:36 Introducing Matt Johnson and QC Ware
01:19 Google’s Quantum Breakthrough
01:52 Understanding Qubits and Modalities
06:01 Global Quantum Conferences and Keynotes
08:12 The Global Quantum Landscape
12:45 QC Ware’s Molecular Design Software
18:48 Looking Ahead: The Future of Quantum Computing
22:37 Closing Remarks and Contact Information
Transcript
[00:00] Veronica: Hello, and welcome to the quantum spin by HKA. I’m Veronica Combs. I’m a writer and an editor here at the agency. I get to talk every day with really smart people working on really fascinating subjects, everything in the Quantum industry, from hardware to software. On our podcast, we focus in on quantum communication, and by that I don’t mean making networks safe from hacking or entangling photons over long distance, but talking about the technology.
[00:26] How do you explain these complicated concepts to people who don’t have a background in science and engineering but want to understand all the same?
[00:36] Veronica Combs: Today I am talking with Matt Johnson, the CEO and co-founder of QC Ware. QC Ware specializes in software, but Matt also is the host of the annual Q2B meetings, which happens around the world. These are quantum conferences that really bring the ecosystem together and give folks a chance to catch up on all sorts of topics. Matt, thanks for joining us today.
[00:56] Matt Johnson: Veronica, thanks a lot for having me. It’s nice to be here.
[00:59] Veronica Combs: And you just finished up your last event of the year, Q2B Silicon Valley. That was the second week of December, right?
[01:05] Matt Johnson: That is exactly right. It was the 10th to the 12th of December at the Santa Clara convention center, which for the US edition of this conference series is going to continue to be our home for some time since it’s kind of roomy. It’s got room to grow.
[01:18] Veronica Combs: Yes, and Google sort of kicked off the event with a bang with their news about their willow chip and their cupids. That must have been an exciting opening day for you.
[01:27] Matt Johnson: It was because increasingly with the Q2B conference, vendors in the quantum computing space are taking advantage of the platform of the conference to make major announcements.
[01:38] So we were super happy that Google elected to do kind of the first public unveiling of this announcement at the conference. Would you like me to just put into layman’s terms a little bit about what that announcement was?
[01:51] Veronica Combs: Yeah, that’d be great.
[01:52] Matt Johnson: What Google announced was the development of a very high quality, high reliability qubit that will enable the scaling up of a full scale quantum computer. If you think about the chip on your phone or on your laptop. If you looked at it, put a magnifying glass on it, so to speak, you’d see billions and billions of transistors.
[02:15] So in the case of a typical processor, transistors are the fundamental building block of that chip, and they all work together to calculate solutions to problems. The equivalent of that in the quantum processor on a quantum chip is a qubit. It’s also a physical device, a physical switch. So you can think of a qubit like a quantum transistor.
[02:33] And for the last couple of decades, many, many research labs have been trying to produce a qubit. A quantum transistor that is sufficiently reliable that it can be used as the fundamental building block for a quantum processor to really scale up. And Google for the first time achieved that.
[02:51] There’s a lot of complexity around how they did it. But they’ve made that step, which is a very serious milestone on the way to building useful quantum computers.
[03:00] Veronica Combs: And this is a superconducting qubit, is that right? Which is the same modality that IBM uses.
[03:05] Matt Johnson: Google uses loops of wire, little loops of superconducting wire that are referred to generally as transmon qubits. These devices are kind of less than a millimeter in size. So they’re almost visible to the naked eye, but they’re little loops of wire that when pulsed with energy, and cooled to near absolute zero, do some funky quantum mechanical things.
[03:27] So you’re using these loops of wire that generate these quantum mechanical phenomena, and you’re harnessing those phenomena to do useful work on the chip.
[03:37] Veronica Combs: Once you get sort of, more general business riders over the whole quantum mechanics hump, then you have the whole modality challenge.
[03:44] And, I was talking to a reporter the other day, he was clearly familiar with superconducting qubits, but not so much with the other modalities. And, to me, that’s one of the good parts about your event is that you bring together those different modalities. It’s not just superconducting or neutral atom or trapped ion it’s everybody and that gives certainly me as a person talking with the press a chance to say, you know here’s the broader realm of quantum approaches to quantum hardware
[04:09] Matt Johnson: And what’s been very interesting over the past seven years that the conference has been held, there’s been this evolution of each of these modalities so there’s more visibility and I would even say if you fast forward five years into the future, you will see other, as you say, modalities or technology approaches to building quantum, which will have matured to a state that you will see more companies proposing to use those modalities as a basis for a large scale machine.
[04:36] As a matter of fact, if you fast forward 10 or 15 years the real growth is going to be to try to build quantum computers that have qubits that are embedded onto processor substrates, just like transistors on a chip.
[04:50] So you will see, hundreds of thousands of millions and someday in the future, billions of qubits. You cannot grow to that scale using some of the modalities that exist today, but they’ll get us some part of the way there on that big journey. But the end game for quantum processors is going to use technology that today is at a very early stage of development.
[05:13] Veronica Combs: And what do you think about the idea that certain modalities will be better for certain use cases? Do you think that that is sort of a medium-term idea? Whereas in the longer run, there will be one modality that’s generally accepted as the best one?
[05:26] Matt Johnson: I do. I think in the long run, you might have two or three modalities that will prevail and go into heavy, large scale production and to be used widely across enterprises. But I believe that those two or three modalities that may make it through all of these wickets and get out there and get released in the wild, I think that they will probably all generally be able to run all of the same types of algorithms and problems.
[05:53] Veronica Combs: And I know some folks get frustrated that Google dominates the news. Were there other announcements, or another piece of news people should take away?
[06:01] Matt Johnson: A couple of things. John Preskill is one of the major keynotes for the conference every year, and every time John presents, he does introduce a new thing to think about for the year. He did that this time as well, where he talked about trying to define a particular upcoming era of quantum computing where there will be kind of medium scale error corrected machines. And he talked about how this should, there’s a seriously high probability that those machines will in fact be able to do useful work across a couple of different problem domains.
[06:36] So I think it was interesting. John is really regarded as the most realistic and reliable, incredible source of information around quantum computing, so really the ground truths. And so his talk every year is always keyed into to say, okay, what is John’s view on the state of the industry.
[06:53] And then I think the other thing that is really growing in the conference is that when we first started it in 2017, 100% of the content and vendors there were just quantum computing. But now something like 30 or 40 percent of the content is around quantum communications, quantum networking, quantum sensing.
[07:12] And these are very interesting. I think the other interesting thing that we’re doing is the U. S. government, like many other governments, is starting to put more and more funding and resources into quantum technologies. And in particular, the Department of Defense. So this year we had Rear Admiral Rick Seif as a keynote speaker.
[07:33] And Admiral Seif runs all of the submarine forces in the Indo Pacific region. He’s got a very high-profile job and he works around high technology. We will in the conference series build out the kind of D.O.D. and U.S. government element. In other words, what are they interested in? What are they doing in the space so that everyone has good visibility on that?
[07:55] Veronica Combs: Yes, I was at the event in 2022 and I heard Scott Aronson speak as well. And as you said, it was a really great opportunity to be introduced to all these people that you just, like you said, read their opinions online or you hear that they’re a respected source, but then to get to see them talk and to hear their take on things was really great.
[08:12] So quantum is a global industry. We’ve had folks from Germany on the podcast, from Australia, certainly from the U S from the UK. How do you think about the different communities around the world? Are there research hubs that you think of as having a particular strength?
[08:27] Matt Johnson: That’s a very good question. When you asked that question, the first place my mind went to was thinking about all of the national level quantum computing hardware programs that exist. So if you think about the G20, I don’t think there’s a G20 country that doesn’t have an articulated, organized, funded program to build its own quantum computer.
[08:49] And if you said, well, why is that? Why don’t they just look to the big superpowers in advanced computing and assume that they’ll procure their system? I think because this is such a strategic technology, there’s a concern among many national governments that they might not have access to the very best quantum computers.
[09:08] That the vendors or the nation states that have these machines might try to monopolize them. And I think because this technology is considered so crucial, so critical, I think these countries are saying, no, we’ve got to build our own thing. Like this is a future technology, super important. So that’s the first place where my mind goes.
[09:25] When you talk about the strengths and weaknesses of different regions, go back to the origins of quantum information theory and quantum physics. I think Europe has had a very deep and very long track record of being leaders in quantum information and quantum physics.
[09:42] When I think about regions, I think about Europe having all of this physics and math background, because the math piece is also important. A pure math and applied math and so I think Europe’s big challenge is to try to champion hardware programs that will truly be competitive with extremely well-funded programs in the U.S. And China. I think that’s something very interesting to watch going forward. From the E.U. ‘s perspective, there are many technologies that perhaps got incubated in Europe and then got expanded and proliferated or built out in other regions. So I think that’s something very interesting to watch how Europe overall tries to make sure that they have a very strong leadership position and in particular quantum computing hardware. That will be very interesting to watch.
[10:31] Veronica Combs: Yes, like the Max Planck Institute is one example of that deep math background that you mentioned. It’s been encouraging to see different startups start to work with the HPC centers in Europe, you know, the supercomputers around the continent.
[10:43] And I think it has. Those partnerships will hopefully be very fruitful as well.
[10:48] Matt Johnson: That’s exactly right. That’s how the European governments are doing it. As you said, their national HPC centers are the ones that are sponsoring or coordinating or integrating quantum computing into that. That’s, yeah, that’s exactly right.
[11:01] Veronica Combs: So there’s a Q2B Tokyo, a Q2B Paris, a Q2B Silicon Valley. As we mentioned, you just wrapped up putting on events is a lot of work and certainly around the world, it’s even another layer of challenge. But is there another city you could add if you had all the resources you needed to do so?
[11:16] Matt Johnson: Yes. So first of all, we love doing this. We’re a software company. Like our business has nothing to do with events, of course. But we actually love doing this. It pulls the whole quantum computing community together. And the culture of our company anyway is quite open and we’ve always been that way and I’ve always tried to pull other groups together.
[11:36] So hosting this, organizing this is something that we really like to do. But yeah, if I thought about other regions, I could see Israel, for instance. I think that would be interesting. I could see somewhere in the Mid-east, the UAE, perhaps there are, when you think about that region, there’s also quantum computing that’s growing there.
[11:54] I think we could possibly have satellite programs in places like South Korea, the Republic of Korea. But I think for 2025 will hold firm with just these three locations and obviously as the industry expands, we’re going to expand with it. Yeah.
[12:09] Veronica Combs: Yeah. Israel. That is a good point. I hadn’t thought about that, but there is a lot of interesting work going on there too. And, UAE, I can see that one as well. You mentioned the military speaker at this year’s conference. I do remember, I think there was someone from the Air Force at the 2022 conference at Silicon Valley and sensing is really, whenever I’m trying to get someone to understand quantum technology, I talk about sensing and GPS, and it has been really exciting to see that part of the industry grow.
[12:36] So as you mentioned, you’re not an event company. QC Ware is a quantum software company. Tell me what you do there at QC Ware when you’re not organizing events.
[12:45] Matt Johnson: Well, the cornerstone product of QC Ware is a molecular design software platform. It’s called Promethium. And Promethium runs, by the way, it runs on GPUs, it runs on NVIDIA hardware today.
[12:57] It is architected so that when quantum hardware matures and becomes powerful, quantum processing can be so called slotted in to those GP workflows to boost the power for users. What we do is we have developed this scientific software package that allows, let’s say, pharmaceutical companies to evaluate molecules that are candidates to become new drugs.
[13:22] So at the core of every drug, the foundational piece of a drug, of course, is a molecule referred to as a ligand and drug companies have to review the properties of hundreds of thousands or millions of candidate molecules before selecting ones that will go through clinical trials. And all of that work is very, very expensive and very time consuming.
[13:43] And so over the past kind of decade or two, there’s been a gradual shift to trying to do that work on evaluating molecules instead of actually synthesizing or making them in a so-called wet lab to do this simulation using computers. This is effectively digital engineering, or what’s called computer aided drug discovery.
[14:00] So we’re in that space, and we happen to have built out now the most powerful computational chemistry platform in the market, and we launched that about a year and a quarter ago, and we’re very, very quickly expanding, and eating into that marketplace. So, I think if you fast forward a year or two, I think Promethium is going to be used by virtually all of the leading pharma companies.
[14:24] And I can’t really mention names yet, but we are selling to half of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies in the world right now. And that’s just about a year and a quarter after launch. And what, the reason I’m intrigued about this, first of all, just as a GPU powered product, it’s immensely powerful. But the really intriguing thing is one of the problem classes that’s being addressed by this is simulating the electronic, the structure of molecules, like how electrons interact, electrons being parts of atoms.
[14:54] And this is something very hard to calculate classically, it takes a lot of processing power and memory. But a quantum computer is ideally suited to run that particular problem, because when you think about these qubits that we talked about earlier, you can think of that qubit as kind of being a synthetic electron or a synthetic atom.
[15:13] And so you can think about taking this real-world molecule and just mapping each atom or each electron onto each of the qubits on the processor. So you have a quantum mechanical system in real life being simulated by a machine that is quantum mechanically driven. So it’s kind of an ideal match.
[15:31] And so we think that this application area will be the first one that will be boosted by quantum computing. So the idea is to get a ton of users using our product and for them to be able to do hard, heavy duty workloads and for one day for them to use the machine and see our software and to see that it can do much larger molecules and do them in less time or with higher accuracy and to be able to point and say, Oh, yeah, I guess you guys now are augmenting the power of this platform with quantum processing.
[16:01] So that’s the vision of the whole software program that we have.
[16:05] Veronica Combs: And so right now, just to contrast your software with existing drug discovery software, if you have 20 candidates, it would take a long time to explore the strength or weaknesses of each one or to simulate each one with the classical approach.
[16:22] And so with quantum, the idea is not only could you process through them faster, you would find the dead ends faster, right? You would be able to find better molecules faster. Is that a fair way to think about it?
[16:35] Matt Johnson: With the overall platform? Yes, that’s true.
[16:37] The fundamental, if you’re asking the question, what does quantum bring to the party? It should bring higher accuracy measurements, which will allow these drug developers to make better informed decisions, and it should allow these problems to be solved in much less time.
[16:52] So it’s, it’s a curiosity, but it’s quite true. In this space, in molecular design or drug discovery, it is, believe it or not, routine for these chemists to let a simulation program run for days or weeks. They literally will have a problem running for a couple of weeks and then evaluate the answers to make a decision off it.
[17:11] What you want to do, of course, is shrink weeks down to hours and then finally minutes. And so quantum processing can play a role in that.
[17:19] Veronica Combs: And so when we say simulation, that’s always one of the top use cases for, you know, what are we going to do with quantum computers once the hardware is at scale and simulation is one of the first ones that you hear.
[17:31] And so if I’m a chemist and I want to simulate a molecule or interactions of a molecule, if it’s a complex molecule, it gets very time consuming very fast, and you can’t always predict like how things will interact. That’s my very, non-chemist description, but is that how you think about it?
[17:48] Like, that’s what we need to know at the end, how they’re going to work together and if it will have a good result or a bad result.
[17:53] Matt Johnson: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Yes.
[17:55] Veronica Combs: And I think in this era of Instacart and tracking a package from the warehouse to your front door, I think people don’t understand about those processes that still take weeks or months or whatever.
[18:06] And so speeding up that simulation has obvious business benefits and also, as I mentioned, you don’t have to wait a week to find out that you picked the wrong compound.
[18:14] Matt Johnson: Yeah, that’s precisely it. I think it’s really important in quantum computing, if you’re driving a company forward, you have to think about what the business value is of what you’re doing. Sure, it’s nice to have a powerful technology, but the important thing is, okay, like, who cares? What’s it useful for in the real world? And that’s certainly the ethos of our company.
[18:32] We have a business mindset, and we’re focused at the application layer, so that we’re trying to help answer the most important question out there, which is what are these machines really good for, like in the real world, what would be the first things that they’ll be useful for, and so we put a lot of our chips in so called quantum chemistry.
[18:48] Veronica Combs: This year, 2025 is the International Year of Quantum. And I know that lots of companies are having special events or doing some research or taking a fresh look at the market, at the workforce. Is QC Ware planning any Year of Quantum celebrations this year?
[19:03] Matt Johnson: Well, it’s come full circle to what you were talking about with our community outreach. So, with the Q2B conference series we’ll be in Tokyo in May, Paris in September, and back in Silicon Valley in December. So there’s from the sponsors of the conference and the vendors, there’s just this very high demand for them to showcase what they’re doing for the quantum year.
[19:26] So I think our main contribution will be to continue to have this forum for all the members of the community. For us, it could be in 2025 or it could be in a couple of years. I just want our company to be the first one that introduces quantum coprocessing for enterprise problems for our customers.
[19:44] There’s probably not a high chance that will happen in 2025 in the Year of Quantum. But I’m looking beyond that and saying, look, that’s really the important goal: to demonstrate that a quantum processor can do incremental useful work sitting next to the most powerful classical processors in the world today, which are NVIDIA GPUs.
[20:03] So that’s really our goal.
[20:05] Veronica Combs: And when you say, coprocessing, do you mean, As part of a hybrid architecture, or do you mean doing the same work that the HPC is doing ?
[20:13] Matt Johnson: Hybrid. Exactly what you said.
[20:15] Veronica Combs: Yes. Okay. Yes, that’s come up a lot more. And I think that’s really helped us introduce the topic to reporters and to analysts.
[20:22] You know, it’s not going to be a switch overnight. We’re not all going to suddenly start using quantum hardware. It’s going to be this combination and using the strengths of each platform.
[20:30] Matt Johnson: Yeah.
[20:31] Veronica Combs: Do you have any other 2025 predictions or any part of the industry that you’re keeping an eye on just out of curiosity?
[20:37] Matt Johnson: What I’m going to be looking for and what I think everyone will, will be to see hardware vendors. There are a number of leading hardware vendors out there who now fueled by this Google announcement will be introducing their own arrays or sets of logical qubit.
[20:52] So I think the most exciting thing in 2025 will be the development of these smaller scale, but logical qubit driven machines. On the algorithm side, that’s where we come in. We’re really an algorithms company. I will look to us and others who are leaders in the space to come up with algorithms that are tuned to squeeze more and more useful power out of those very early generation machines.
[21:16] And I think as soon as we have logical qubit driven machines that have, let’s say, between 60 and 100 qubits. It’s in that range that you’ll start to be able to see some very, perhaps arcane use cases emerge where quantum processing truly is making a difference. But I do think obviously, since you can simulate classically 50 or 60 qubits with high accuracy or ideal accuracy, you’re going to have to get at least over that hurdle.
[21:42] But, you know, around this 60 to 100 qubit range, that’s where I think some interesting things will start happening.
[21:47] Veronica Combs: Yes. Yes. I think so too. I know that you just wrapped up your third show of 2024. But do speaker nominations or applications of that process open up sometime in, I guess, late Q1? Do you have that date yet?
[22:01] Matt Johnson: So actually we are in conversations with a number of vendors right now for all three conferences. So I would say if any of your listeners are interested in having a speaking slot, exhibition space, or any of the like, please do reach out to us. All the contact information is on the Q2B website. We would welcome that. We want to build the community.
[22:21] Veronica Combs: Yes. Well, hopefully I can talk Hilary into letting me go to Paris this year. I’d love to meet our clients there and attend. So thank you Matt so much for your time. It’s been great to hear about the events and about QC Ware as well.
[22:33] And, best wishes in the new year.
[22:35] Matt Johnson: Same to you. Same to you. Happy holidays.
Host Veronica Combs is a quantum tech editor, writer and PR professional. She manages public relations for quantum computing and tech clients as an account manager with HKA Marketing Communications, the #1 agency in quantum tech PR. You can find them on X, formerly known as Twitter, @HKA_PR. Veronica joined HKA from TechRepublic, where she was a senior writer. She has covered technology, healthcare and business strategy for more than 10 years. If you’d like to be on the podcast yourself, you can reach her on LinkedIn, Veronica Combs, or you can go to the HKA website and share your suggestion via the Contact Us page.
January 7, 2025
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