SC 2024 – and the centrality of Quantum Computing

From faith to conviction

It turns out that the ‘one’ question resonating across the booths, corridors, main hall and side rooms at SC 2024 this year is not about GenAi. At least not directly.

The stream of announcements over the past few days, from global players such as Infineon, MSFT, IBM and NVIDIA ?shares one core theme – that of anticipating the union of quantum computers with classical (i.e. non-quantum) supercomputing power and the associated impact on GenAi and real measurable and valuable scientific discovery that will have deep impact across all societies.

To say this is pleasing and rewarding is a gross understatement. I know that many of us in the quantum computing eco-system have been anticipating this for some time now, and it is clear that Quantinuum’s leadership in all areas of quantum computing from the Hardware to the Middleware and the application layer in a fully integrated system, is starting to be meaningful in the sense we can now start to see how the first genuinely impactful real world impact of quantum processors will not be as stand-alone systems, but as part of what is commonly described as ‘hybrid’ computing clusters.

This paradigm, at least within the quantum computing community, was given a huge boost with the advent of easily accessible GenAi – the ‘chatgpt’ moment – which started to bring to the fore, in sharp focus I should say, how challenges ranging from power consumption to accuracy and accountability within Ai systems as a whole might be impacted by quantum computers.

On the one hand, therefore, we may not yet be seeing the demise of Moore’s law, and on the other we may not need to wait another decade for quantum computers to have a meaningful role in everyday life. Both of these outcomes are positive !!

It took a quantum computer that cannot be classically simulated to start to answer these questions, but of course it’s not only the fact that quantum computers will enhance Ai, but the fact that a hybrid cluster will accelerate both classical and quantum computing.

That quantum computer was Quantinuum’s H2 System, released in June 2024.

But what will it take to get to the reality of quantum computers playing a meaningful role on the terms described above, in everyday life ?

That question has taken centre stage during the past few days and deserves a closer look.

It is one thing when quantum computing companies insist on the importance of quantum computing’s potential to breach the boundaries of what can and cannot be achieved using classical computer, and quite another when that refrain becomes far more comprehensive and specific – i.e. when the whole of the computing sector at SC2024 start to think about real-world impact. The announcements that I refer to by organisations such as Infineon, Nvidia and Microsoft at the start of this article are just the most noteworthy of these declarations.

Whilst it is true that every nation state of consequence has a formal Quantum Strategy, quantum technologies are still not a part of mainstream conversations about Ai. In fact, large stand-alone Ai players have been uniformly silent in this regard. SC 2024 has changed that situation, irreversibly. And the reason for this is that even though most statements are aspirational – a good example is IONQ’s work with IMEC, at least they are now gaining traction as points of discussion.

Another great example of ambitious aspiration is MSFT’s comments at Ignite around their exploration of work with Atom Computing, a start-up in Colorado, which sketches a plan that, if they achieve some major engineering and scientific breakthroughs, will create a platform just a little less powerful than Quantinuum’s H1. We know just how ambitious the MSFT quantum team is, and how exceptionally talented, since we have worked with them closely as highlighted in some groundbreaking experiments with Quantinuum’s existing commercial systems with MSFT that were rightly described as being the first ‘reliable’ quantum computing platform. Its not a coincidence therefore that Microsoft have also been keen to show how a hybrid quantum-classical system is going to be important in accelerating scientific discovery.

However, the real call to action for everyone remotely interested in harvesting the rewards promised by a conjunction of Ai, HPC and Quantum computers, is based on the fact that everything that is being aspired to and planned for 2027 and beyond by almost all of the announcements in the past few days, already exists today at Quantinuum. The sharp focus I refer to above, is exemplified by the release in the past 48 hrs of our inclusive quantum computing platform “Nexus” (the only such tool in existence) and our computational chemistry application, InQuanto v4, that can be used in conjunction with our H2 quantum computer that literally cannot be simulated and is the most extensively benchmarked quantum computer in existence. Products such as InQuanto are no longer merely experimental - as many of our valued customers and partners can now attest to.

Additionally, in another instance of the speed of engineering advances, last year we entangled 28 logical qubits using 32 physical qubits with orders of magnitude better results than, for example, the laudable experiments announced by Atom, and made possible by our then world leading two-qubit gate fidelities that are now even better.

The point here is not that we are significantly ahead of the rest of the quantum hardware sector, but that we are now seeing other organisations start the journey from mere theory into sustainable advances. That is what makes the quantum eco-system stronger for all of us, and marks the transition to an exciting investable and rewarding source of immense economic value.

And things are not static. In our case, in 2025, with the launch of Helios, our next generation quantum computer, we will have circuit depths and computation power that none of the other quantum computing companies are expecting for at least 3 years, but which will spur healthy competition and benefits for everyone who can visualise deep value to their business as well as for solving some of the world's most intractable problems.

This makes me hopeful about the overall quantum ecosystem as evidenced by the ambitious plans of companies such as IQM and Quandela and Atom and others and supported by the work of established majors such as Microsoft and Google and AWS who are also committed to quantum computing.

It is this fact – that at Quantinuum, the hardware, the middleware, and the application layer is available today - that has moved the needle, and what is then even more compelling than mere belief. I have lost count of the number of customers and government research programmes that have now witnessed and experienced our quantum processors at first hand and realized just what is possible right now. It is now no longer a question of believing those that shout loudest - any and all claims can be validated and tested with actual implementation and benchmarking.

A great example of this journey - where decades long held aspirations can become a reality and a first step in a transformational journey, is when, in July 2024, Singapore research organisations signed an MOU with us enabling access to our quantum computers, to explore and collaborate on quantum computing use cases, focusing on computational biology, and collaborate in hybrid computing and talent development.

As I say, the fact that a number of credible quantum computing companies have ambitious plans to catch up in the next 3 to 5 years if they can address scientific and engineering challenges is even more exciting.

I want to finish however, by also highlighting the work that was disclosed by Infineon that underscores the roadmap to fault tolerant universal quantum computing (at least for Quantinuum). This underscores the fact that our roadmap is no longer dependant on scientific discovery. It is real, it is tangible and it is measurable.

In the past year we at Quantinuum have announced partnerships and customers with governments and govt organisations in Japan, the UK, Singapore and the Middle East, and will likely disclose far ranging partnerships with global corporates in the very near term. These things don’t happen by accident and we are grateful that our partners choose to work with us, based on empirical results available today.

The announcements by so many great organisations at and around SC 2024 should therefore be seen in this context, and accelerate in their own way, the point at which quantum computing becomes a mainstream topic of conversation for Ai and beyond.

And – for now – I leave you with a teaser. At what point in 2025 will we have the world’s most powerful quantum computer working as part of an industrially relevant system with GenAi and HPC ? Sooner than you might think. Watch this space ??