D-Wave Systems
Encyclopedia
D-Wave Systems, Inc. is a quantum computing company, based in Burnaby, British Columbia
. On May 11, 2011, D-Wave System announced D-Wave One, labeled "the world's first commercially available quantum computer," and also referred to it as an adiabatic quantum computer using quantum annealing
to solve optimization problems operating on an 128 qubit
chip-set.
The D-Wave One was built on early prototypes such as D-Wave's Orion Quantum Computer.
The prototype was a 16-qubit
adiabatic quantum computer, demonstrated on February 13, 2007 at the Computer History Museum
in Mountain View, California
. D-Wave demonstrated what they claimed to be a 28-qubit adiabatic quantum computer on November 12, 2007. The chip was fabricated at NASA's
Jet Propulsion Lab's
microdevices lab in Pasadena.
integrated circuit
with up to 128 pair-wise coupled superconducting flux qubit
s. The processor is designed to implement a special-purpose adiabatic quantum optimization algorithm
as opposed to being operated as a universal gate-model quantum computer
.
D-Wave maintains a list of peer-reviewed technical publications on their website.
and Zagoskin was a postdoctoral fellow. The company name refers to their first qubit designs, which used d-wave superconductors.
D-Wave operated as an offshoot from UBC, while maintaining ties with the department of Physics and Astronomy. It funded academic research in quantum computing, thus building a collaborative network of research scientists. The company collaborated with several universities and institutions, including UBC, IPHT Jena
, Université de Sherbrooke
, University of Toronto
, University of Twente, Chalmers University of Technology
, University of Erlangen, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory
. These researchers worked with D-Wave scientists and engineers. Some of D-Wave's peer-reviewed technical publications come from this period. Some publications have D-Wave employees as authors, while others include employees of their partners as well or only. As of 2005, these partnerships were no longer listed on D-Wave's website.
D-Wave operated from various locations in Vancouver and laboratory spaces at UBC before moving to its current location in the neighboring suburb of Burnaby.
The first application, an example of pattern matching
, performed a search for a similar compound to a known drug within a database of molecules. The next application computed a seating arrangement for an event subject to compatibilities and incompatibilities between guests. The last involved solving a Sudoku
puzzle.
The processors at the heart of D-Wave's "Orion quantum computing system" are hardware accelerators designed to solve a particular NP-complete
problem related to the two dimensional Ising model
in a magnetic field
. D-Wave terms the device a 16-qubit
superconducting adiabatic quantum computer
processor.
According to the company, a conventional front end running an application that requires the solution of an NP-complete problem, such as pattern matching
, passes the problem to the Orion system. However, the company does not make the claim its systems can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time.
According to Dr. Geordie Rose, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of D-Wave, NP-complete problems "are probably not exactly solvable, no matter how big, fast or advanced computers get" so the adiabatic quantum computer used by the Orion system is intended to quickly compute an approximate solution.
research team led by Hartmut Neven
used D-Wave's processor to train a binary image classifier.
. Rainier uses a process called quantum annealing
to solve optimization problems. The D-Wave One is claimed to be the world's first commercially available quantum computer system.
May 20, 2011, D-Wave Systems is marketing a $10,000,000 Quantum Computer named "D-Wave One" with a 128-qubit (quantum bit) chipset that performs just a single task -- discrete optimization.
signed a multi-year contract with D-Wave Systems to realize the benefits based upon a quantum annealing
processor applied to some of Lockheed's most challenging computation problems.The contract also includes maintenance, associated professional services, and the purchase of the D-Wave One Quantum Computer System.
, a Computer Science
professor at MIT who specializes in the theory of quantum computing, D-Wave's demonstration did not prove anything about the workings of the computer. He claimed a useful quantum computer would require a huge breakthrough in physics, which has not been published or shared with the physics community. Dr. Aaronson has maintained or updated his criticisms on his blog. See for a reaction to Scott Aaronson's criticisms by Dr. David Bacon, a professor at the University of Washington.
Umesh Vazirani
, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the founders of quantum complexity theory, made the following criticism:
Wim van Dam, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, summarized the current scientific community consensus in the journal Nature:
British Columbia
British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...
. On May 11, 2011, D-Wave System announced D-Wave One, labeled "the world's first commercially available quantum computer," and also referred to it as an adiabatic quantum computer using quantum annealing
Quantum annealing
In mathematics and applications, quantum annealing is a general method for finding the global minimum of a given objective function over a given set of candidate solutions , by a process analogous to quantum fluctuations...
to solve optimization problems operating on an 128 qubit
Qubit
In quantum computing, a qubit or quantum bit is a unit of quantum information—the quantum analogue of the classical bit—with additional dimensions associated to the quantum properties of a physical atom....
chip-set.
The D-Wave One was built on early prototypes such as D-Wave's Orion Quantum Computer.
The prototype was a 16-qubit
Qubit
In quantum computing, a qubit or quantum bit is a unit of quantum information—the quantum analogue of the classical bit—with additional dimensions associated to the quantum properties of a physical atom....
adiabatic quantum computer, demonstrated on February 13, 2007 at the Computer History Museum
Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum is a museum established in 1996 in Mountain View, California, USA. The Museum is dedicated to preserving and presenting the stories and artifacts of the information age, and exploring the computing revolution and its impact on our lives.-History:The museum's origins...
in Mountain View, California
Mountain View, California
-Downtown:Mountain View has a pedestrian-friendly downtown centered on Castro Street. The downtown area consists of the seven blocks of Castro Street from the Downtown Mountain View Station transit center in the north to the intersection with El Camino Real in the south...
. D-Wave demonstrated what they claimed to be a 28-qubit adiabatic quantum computer on November 12, 2007. The chip was fabricated at NASA's
NASA
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation's civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research...
Jet Propulsion Lab's
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center located in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County, California, United States. The facility is headquartered in the city of Pasadena on the border of La Cañada Flintridge and Pasadena...
microdevices lab in Pasadena.
Technology description
As of June 2010, it has been published that a D-Wave processor comprises a programmable superconductingSuperconductivity
Superconductivity is a phenomenon of exactly zero electrical resistance occurring in certain materials below a characteristic temperature. It was discovered by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes on April 8, 1911 in Leiden. Like ferromagnetism and atomic spectral lines, superconductivity is a quantum...
integrated circuit
Integrated circuit
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit is an electronic circuit manufactured by the patterned diffusion of trace elements into the surface of a thin substrate of semiconductor material...
with up to 128 pair-wise coupled superconducting flux qubit
Flux qubit
In quantum computing, flux qubits are micrometer sized loops of superconducting metal interrupted by a number of Josephson junctions. The junction parameters are engineered during fabrication so that a persistent current will flow continuously when an external flux is applied...
s. The processor is designed to implement a special-purpose adiabatic quantum optimization algorithm
Adiabatic quantum computation
Adiabatic quantum computation relies on the adiabatic theorem to do calculations. First, a complex Hamiltonian is found whose ground state describes the solution to the problem of interest. Next, a system with a simple Hamiltonian is prepared and initialized to the ground state. Finally, the...
as opposed to being operated as a universal gate-model quantum computer
Quantum circuit
In quantum information theory, a quantum circuit is a model for quantum computation in which a computation is a sequence of quantum gates, which are reversible transformations on a quantum mechanical analog of an n-bit register...
.
D-Wave maintains a list of peer-reviewed technical publications on their website.
History
D-Wave was founded by Haig Farris (former chair of board), Geordie Rose (CTO and former CEO), Bob Wiens (former CFO), and Alexandre Zagoskin (former VP Research and Chief Scientist). Farris taught an entrepreneurship course at UBC, where Rose obtained his Ph.D.Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
and Zagoskin was a postdoctoral fellow. The company name refers to their first qubit designs, which used d-wave superconductors.
D-Wave operated as an offshoot from UBC, while maintaining ties with the department of Physics and Astronomy. It funded academic research in quantum computing, thus building a collaborative network of research scientists. The company collaborated with several universities and institutions, including UBC, IPHT Jena
IPHT Jena
The Institute of Photonic Technology is a non-university research facility in Jena, Thuringia, Germany. Focused on applications for various physical systems, the Institute's mandate is to find solutions to challenges in high technology systems...
, Université de Sherbrooke
Université de Sherbrooke
The Université de Sherbrooke is a large university with campuses located in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada and Longueuil, a suburb of Montreal approximately west of Sherbrooke. It is one of two universities, and the only French language university, in the Estrie region of Quebec.In 2007, the...
, University of Toronto
University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...
, University of Twente, Chalmers University of Technology
Chalmers University of Technology
Chalmers University of Technology , is a Swedish university located in Gothenburg that focuses on research and education in technology, natural science and architecture.-History:...
, University of Erlangen, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center located in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County, California, United States. The facility is headquartered in the city of Pasadena on the border of La Cañada Flintridge and Pasadena...
. These researchers worked with D-Wave scientists and engineers. Some of D-Wave's peer-reviewed technical publications come from this period. Some publications have D-Wave employees as authors, while others include employees of their partners as well or only. As of 2005, these partnerships were no longer listed on D-Wave's website.
D-Wave operated from various locations in Vancouver and laboratory spaces at UBC before moving to its current location in the neighboring suburb of Burnaby.
Orion
On February 13, 2007, D-Wave demonstrated the Orion system, running three different applications at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. This marked the first public demonstration of, supposedly, a quantum computer and associated service.The first application, an example of pattern matching
Pattern matching
In computer science, pattern matching is the act of checking some sequence of tokens for the presence of the constituents of some pattern. In contrast to pattern recognition, the match usually has to be exact. The patterns generally have the form of either sequences or tree structures...
, performed a search for a similar compound to a known drug within a database of molecules. The next application computed a seating arrangement for an event subject to compatibilities and incompatibilities between guests. The last involved solving a Sudoku
Sudoku
is a logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle. The objective is to fill a 9×9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 sub-grids that compose the grid contains all of the digits from 1 to 9...
puzzle.
The processors at the heart of D-Wave's "Orion quantum computing system" are hardware accelerators designed to solve a particular NP-complete
NP-complete
In computational complexity theory, the complexity class NP-complete is a class of decision problems. A decision problem L is NP-complete if it is in the set of NP problems so that any given solution to the decision problem can be verified in polynomial time, and also in the set of NP-hard...
problem related to the two dimensional Ising model
Ising model
The Ising model is a mathematical model of ferromagnetism in statistical mechanics. The model consists of discrete variables called spins that can be in one of two states . The spins are arranged in a graph , and each spin interacts with its nearest neighbors...
in a magnetic field
Magnetic field
A magnetic field is a mathematical description of the magnetic influence of electric currents and magnetic materials. The magnetic field at any given point is specified by both a direction and a magnitude ; as such it is a vector field.Technically, a magnetic field is a pseudo vector;...
. D-Wave terms the device a 16-qubit
Qubit
In quantum computing, a qubit or quantum bit is a unit of quantum information—the quantum analogue of the classical bit—with additional dimensions associated to the quantum properties of a physical atom....
superconducting adiabatic quantum computer
Quantum computer
A quantum computer is a device for computation that makes direct use of quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. Quantum computers are different from traditional computers based on transistors...
processor.
According to the company, a conventional front end running an application that requires the solution of an NP-complete problem, such as pattern matching
Pattern matching
In computer science, pattern matching is the act of checking some sequence of tokens for the presence of the constituents of some pattern. In contrast to pattern recognition, the match usually has to be exact. The patterns generally have the form of either sequences or tree structures...
, passes the problem to the Orion system. However, the company does not make the claim its systems can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time.
According to Dr. Geordie Rose, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of D-Wave, NP-complete problems "are probably not exactly solvable, no matter how big, fast or advanced computers get" so the adiabatic quantum computer used by the Orion system is intended to quickly compute an approximate solution.
2009 Google demonstration
On Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference, a GoogleGoogle
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...
research team led by Hartmut Neven
Hartmut Neven
Hartmut Neven is a scientist working in computational neurobiology, robotics and computer vision. He is best known for his work in face and object recognition. He is currently Director of Engineering at Google.- Education :...
used D-Wave's processor to train a binary image classifier.
D-Wave One quantum computer system
On May 11, 2011, D-Wave Systems announced the D-Wave One, an integrated quantum computer system running on a 128 qubit processor. The processor used in the D-Wave One code-named Rainier, performs a single mathematical operation named Discrete optimizationDiscrete optimization
Discrete optimization is a branch of optimization in applied mathematics and computer science.As opposed to continuous optimization, the variables used in the mathematical program are restricted to assume only discrete values, such as the integers.Two notable branches of discrete optimization...
. Rainier uses a process called quantum annealing
Quantum annealing
In mathematics and applications, quantum annealing is a general method for finding the global minimum of a given objective function over a given set of candidate solutions , by a process analogous to quantum fluctuations...
to solve optimization problems. The D-Wave One is claimed to be the world's first commercially available quantum computer system.
May 20, 2011, D-Wave Systems is marketing a $10,000,000 Quantum Computer named "D-Wave One" with a 128-qubit (quantum bit) chipset that performs just a single task -- discrete optimization.
Lockheed Martin and D-Wave collaboration
On May 25, 2011, Lockheed MartinLockheed Martin
Lockheed Martin is an American global aerospace, defense, security, and advanced technology company with worldwide interests. It was formed by the merger of Lockheed Corporation with Martin Marietta in March 1995. It is headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland, in the Washington Metropolitan Area....
signed a multi-year contract with D-Wave Systems to realize the benefits based upon a quantum annealing
Quantum annealing
In mathematics and applications, quantum annealing is a general method for finding the global minimum of a given objective function over a given set of candidate solutions , by a process analogous to quantum fluctuations...
processor applied to some of Lockheed's most challenging computation problems.The contract also includes maintenance, associated professional services, and the purchase of the D-Wave One Quantum Computer System.
Criticism
D-Wave has been heavily criticized by some scientists in the quantum computing field. According to Scott AaronsonScott Aaronson
Scott Joel Aaronson is a theoretical computer scientist and faculty member in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.-Education:...
, a Computer Science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
professor at MIT who specializes in the theory of quantum computing, D-Wave's demonstration did not prove anything about the workings of the computer. He claimed a useful quantum computer would require a huge breakthrough in physics, which has not been published or shared with the physics community. Dr. Aaronson has maintained or updated his criticisms on his blog. See for a reaction to Scott Aaronson's criticisms by Dr. David Bacon, a professor at the University of Washington.
Umesh Vazirani
Umesh Vazirani
Umesh Virkumar Vazirani is the Roger A. Strauch Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the Berkeley Quantum Computation Center. Vazirani was himself a Ph.D. student at Berkeley, receiving his Ph.D. in 1986 under the...
, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the founders of quantum complexity theory, made the following criticism:
Wim van Dam, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, summarized the current scientific community consensus in the journal Nature:
Notable alumni and collaborators
D-Wave has employed or hired on a contract basis several key members of the scientific community as well as several notable business consultants. A particle list includes.- Alan Aspuru-Guzik (Harvard)
- Dmitri V. Averin (Stony Brook)
- Seth LloydSeth LloydSeth Lloyd is a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He refers to himself as a "quantum mechanic"....
(MIT)
See also
- AQUA@homeAQUA@homeAQUA@Home was a distributed computing project operated by D-Wave Systems and running on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing software platform, it closed down in August 2011. Its goal was to predict the performance of superconducting adiabatic quantum computers on a variety of...
- Adiabatic quantum computationAdiabatic quantum computationAdiabatic quantum computation relies on the adiabatic theorem to do calculations. First, a complex Hamiltonian is found whose ground state describes the solution to the problem of interest. Next, a system with a simple Hamiltonian is prepared and initialized to the ground state. Finally, the...
- Analog computerAnalog computerAn analog computer is a form of computer that uses the continuously-changeable aspects of physical phenomena such as electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic quantities to model the problem being solved...
- Flux qubitFlux qubitIn quantum computing, flux qubits are micrometer sized loops of superconducting metal interrupted by a number of Josephson junctions. The junction parameters are engineered during fabrication so that a persistent current will flow continuously when an external flux is applied...
External links
- Announcement of the 16-qubit quantum computer demonstration
- IEEE Spectrum: Prototype Commercial Quantum Computer Demo'ed, 13 February 2007
- Google Tech Talks: Quantum Computing Day 2: Image Recognition with an Adiabatic Quantum Computer
- D-Wave Systems Orion Web Services