GQI's Quantum Computing Report - Week 42, 2023

Open Quantum Institute to be Launched in Geneva, Switzerland with Two Million Swiss Francs ($2.2M USD) in Funding from UBS

A consortium led by UBS and including the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator Foundation (GESDA), CERN, the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), and the Swiss universities ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) will be established at CERN beginning March 2024 to accelerate the usage of quantum computing to support implementation of six of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The effort will have a three year pilot implementation from 2024-2026 with UBS contributing funding of two million Swiss francs per year. The effort will include over 40 partners from more than 20 different countries to work towards four objectives they call the “4A’s”. These include accelerating applications for humanity, providing access for all, advancing capacity building, and activating multilateral guidance for SDGs. For additional information on this Open Quantum Institute announcement you can view a press release provided by UBS here, another news release from GESDA here, and the web page for the Open Quantum Institute here.

Aliro Quantum Receives Series A Funding

Aliro Quantum has received its Series A funding from several venture firms including?Accenture Ventures?and lead investor?Leaders Fund. Although the company didn’t release the exact amount of the funding, they indicated it was less than $20 million. Aliro is a software company that specializes in providing software that can ?emulate, pilot, and deploy entanglement-based quantum networks. It was spun out of the NarangLab at Harvard University in 2019. Their software was recently selected as the vehicle for providing quantum network configuration, control and orchestration in?the?EPB Quantum Network Powered by Qubitekk?in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The company will be using the new funds to accelerate R&D, expand their professional services, and increase their efforts in sales and marketing. A press release from Aliro announcing this new funding is available here.

$100,000 Quantum Startup Pitch Competition to Be Held at Q2B23 Silicon Valley

Early quantum startups will have a chance to receive a $100,000 investment from Qubits Ventures, a VC firm investing in early-stage quantum tech startups in a pitch competition that will be held on day 2 of the Q2B23 Silicon Valley event on December 6, 2023. Any startup with a focus on quantum solutions that has raised less than $2.5M in funding is eligible to apply. Applications will be evaluated on their uniqueness, feasibility, financial viability, and market desirability. The deadline to submit a pitch for consideration is November 15, 2023. From the submitted entries, seven finalists will be selected to make a live pitch on stage at the event. For terms and conditions of the competition as well as to apply, you can check out the web page for it here.

IQM and VTT Have Installed Finland’s First 20 Qubit Quantum Processor

As part of a program announced in November 2020 to install a series of quantum computers in Finland, IQM and the?VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland have reached the next milestone and installed a 20 qubit superconducting based processor at the?Micronova research facility in Espoo, Finland. It joins a 5 qubit machine that was installed at Micronova in November 2021. The 20 qubit processor includes improved manufacturing, integration, signaling, and packaging techniques which the team will leverage for reaching their next milestone, which will be the installation of a 50+ qubit processor by the end of 2024. Beyond that, the Finnish government has allocated a budget of €70 million ($74M USD) for a follow-on program to develop a 300 qubit quantum processor. A press release announcing the installation of this 20 qubit processor has been posted on the VTT website and can be accessed here.

PASQAL Introduces Qadence Software for Digital Analog Quantum Computing

In quantum computing, there are two different types of modes that can be used to solve a problem. Digital mode is perhaps the more common mode and that implements quantum circuits via a series of gates that are applied to the qubits. The advantage of digital mode is that it is universal and can theoretically be used to solve any problem. The disadvantage of digital mode is that currently the gates are quite noisy so they likely require error correction and thousands of qubits and millions or billions of gates to provide quantum advantage. Analog mode on the other hand puts all the qubits in a register and lets them evolve continuously. So this mode is more tolerant of errors and can perform in one computational step what digital mode would require in thousands of steps. The disadvantage of analog mode, though, is that it is not universal and can only be applied to certain problems.

An interesting feature of neutral atom based quantum computers is that they can support both analog and digital mode. PASQAL has innovated with a new approach called Digital Analog Quantum Computing (DACC) that can use the two together to utilize the best features of each. They are providing an open-source Python library called Qadence to support this. The program configures the qubits into blocks. Single quantum gates can be applied to the qubits within a block and then the blocks are fed into an analog block that will evolve the quantum system continuously in a controlled fashion. Qadence can also be integrated with two other programming libraries developed by PASQAL including PyQTorch, a fast emulator for digital and digital-analog programs built on top of PyTorch, and Pulser, a pulse-level interface for programming neutral atoms devices.

More information is available about Qadence in a press release available here, a blog posting here, and the technical document which can be accessed here.

D-Wave and Satispay Partner to Apply Quantum Solutions to Customer Rewards Programs

Satispay is a company based in Italy that provides a means to make digital payments between friends and/or merchants without using credit cards. They have been working with D-Wave to utilize D-Wave’s Constrained Quadratic Model (CQM) hybrid solver to improve their customer rewards program that will help increase their membership. They have developed an application that shows a 50% improvement for the same amount of budget and plan on putting it into weekly production soon. Additional information about the partnership between the two companies is available in a new release posted on the D-Wave website here.

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