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DAHLGREN, Va.

The Innovation Lab at Naval Surface Warfare Center Dahlgren Division (NSWCDD) hosted its first-ever hackathon in partnership with Microsoft June 2-4.

While the term hackathon may conjure up familiar depictions in media of a raucous semi-sporting event where audiences look on as hackers write line by line of code to break into a borderline impenetrable system, the event does not always quite look like that. This hackathon looked a lot like a room full of smart, creative people working together to develop rapid solutions to difficult problems.

Participants in NSWCDDs first hackathon were challenged to utilize Microsofts quantum computing toolkit to generate solutions to assigned problems.

The Navy is at the forefront of quantum [computing] efforts and Microsoft is very excited to collaborate with the Navy and excited to do this hackathon with the Innovation Lab here at Dahlgren, said Microsoft Technology Strategist Dr. Monica DeZulueta. The caliber of people participating here is phenomenal.

The event kicked off with a quantum computing bootcamp led by Microsoft quantum computing professionals. Participants in the hackathon along with approximately 25 more eager quantum students who joined the event via Microsoft Teams were introduced to quantum computing basics and the Q# programming language.

Quantum computing is a fundamentally different mode of computing from what has traditionally been in use. While classical computing relies on bits of 1s and 0s, quantum computing qbits can exist as 1s and 0s simultaneously.

Although still an emerging field of application, quantum computing holds incredible implications for generating answers to previously intractable problems. From logistics solutions such as flight path optimization to more rapid, higher-fidelity modeling and simulation, quantum computing may play a key role in giving the warfighter the technological advantage over adversaries.

The goal of this hackathon is to get the workforce thinking about quantum computing, said Innovation Lab Director Dr. John Rigsby.

Innovation Lab Deputy Director Tamara Stuart added, Were already seeing how quantum communication and quantum sensors are enhancing our technologies and how we are thinking about these applications in the future. Everybody is expecting a quantum computing revolution to come so we are gearing up.

Rigsby and Stuart said an enthusiastic response followed the call for hackathon participants. Each department across NSWCDD sent its best and brightest minds to compete and vie for the first place title in the bases first-ever hackathon.

When the hacking began in earnest on day two of the event, the spirit of the anticipated battle of the departments shifted from competitive to collaborative as rival teams began to combine brainpower to attack the puzzling set of problems created by Microsoft quantum computing professionals.

Each team presented their solutions on the third and final day of the event. Along with the solutions to the problem set, participants were asked by the events judges to consider potential applications for quantum computing in their everyday work.

Following presentations, judges declared a three-way tie between Dahlgrens Electromagnetic and Sensor System Department, Gun and Electric Weapon Systems Department and the Integrated Combat Systems Department.

Chief Technology Officer Jennifer Clift highlighted the importance of events like this hackathon.

The Innovation Lab is a place for our workforce to explore new technologies and solve complex naval challenges. Our goal is to tap into the entrepreneurial spirit of our talented workforce and provide the resources and environment necessary to discover, innovate and deliver cutting edge capabilities to the warfighter. Events like this hackathon allow our scientists and engineers to learn new skills, collaborate to solve complex challenges, and prepare for future naval technology needs, said Clift.

Stefano Coronado, a scientist from the Electromagnetic and Sensor System Department, said the in-person collaboration was exciting.

This hackathon was a great experience for me, said Coronado.

NSWCDDs Innovation Lab leadership said this is the first of many similar events to come with hackathons hopefully occurring multiple times a year. Plans for the warfare centers second hackathon are already in the works.

Read more here:
NSWCDD Focuses on Quantum Computing with its First-Ever Hackathon - Naval Sea Systems Command

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Multinational conglomerate Honeywell said it will combine with Cambridge Quantum Computing in a bid to form the largest standalone quantum computing company in the world.

According to Honeywell, the merger will be completed in the third quarter of 2021 and will set the pace for what is projected to become a $1 trillion quantum computing industry over the next three decades.

In the yet to be named company, Honeywell will invest between $270 million and $300 million, and will own a major stake. It will also engage in an agreement for manufacturing critical ion traps needed to power quantum hardware.

The new company will be led by Ilyas Khan, the CEO and founder of CQC, a company that focuses on building software for quantum computing. Honeywell Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Darius Adamczyk will serve as chairman of the new company while Tony Uttley, currently the president of HQS, will serve as the new company's president.

"Joining together into an exciting newly combined enterprise, HQS and CQC will become a global powerhouse that will develop and commercialize quantum solutions that address some of humanity's greatest challenges, while driving the development of what will become a $1 trillion industry," Khan said in a statement.

With this new company, both firms plan to use Honeywells hardware expertise and Cambridges software platforms to build the worlds highest-performing computer.

Read more:
Honeywell joins hands with Cambridge Quantum Computing to form a new company - The Hindu

Trinity College Dublin has joined forces with Microsoft Ireland to accelerate the development of next-generation quantum technologies and support future leaders in the field.

Under the agreement, Microsoft will provide funding to support quantum research PhD students in Trinity College, while also establishing a female scholarship programme for the colleges MSc in Quantum Science and Technology.

The collaboration will support quantum research teams in Trinitys School of Physics and foster links with research teams in the private sector.

Having emerged from fundamental science over the last two decades, quantum research is now blossoming and promises to revolutionise technology in the coming years with discoveries and innovations that promise to power a more sustainable, advanced future, said Prof John Goold, who is directing the new MSc in Quantum Science and Technology course.

Microsoft recently announced a full-stack, open-cloud quantum computing ecosystem, named Azure Quantum. Quantum computers can solve in a matter of seconds problems that would take the fastest computers today thousands of years to solve, presenting the opportunity to address climate change, significant pharmaceutical advancements, and so on.

Quantum computing presents unprecedented possibilities to solve societys most complex challenges and help to secure a sustainable future. At Microsoft, were committed to responsibly turning these possibilities into reality for the betterment of humanity and the planet, Cathriona Hallahan, Managing Director, Microsoft Ireland said.

The introduction of the female scholarship programme is a welcome one and I believe more focused mechanisms such as this will help us to attract more females not only into the area of next-generation quantum technologies but also wider STEM related industries.

Prof Goold also praised support for the female-only scholarship programme.

As diversity has grown in my research team at Trinity, we have been more creative in pursuing and delivering high-quality science. Female uptake in certain STEM subjects remains low but initiatives like this are helping to drive positive change he said.

The Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science Simon Harris welcomed the collaboration. I am delighted to see this strong collaboration between Trinity College Dublin and Microsoft. Quantum computing technology will be instrumental in solving some of societys biggest challenges and seeing Ireland at the forefront of this research is tremendously important, he said.

Continued here:
Trinity College teams up with Microsoft on quantum computing programme - The Irish Times

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The U.K. government and IBM this week announced a five-year 210 million ($297.5 million) artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing collaboration, in the hopes of making new discoveries and developing sustainable technologies in fields ranging from life sciences to manufacturing.

The program will hire 60 scientists, as well as bringing in interns and students to work under the auspices of IBM Research and the U.K.s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) at the Hartree Centre in Daresbury, Cheshire. The newly formed Hartree National Centre for Digital Innovation (HNCDI) will apply AI, high performance computing (HPC) and data analytics, quantum computing, and cloud technologies to advance research in areas like materials development and environmental sustainability, IBM said in a statement.

Artificial intelligence and quantum computing have the potential to revolutionize everything from the way we travel to the way we shop. They are exactly the kind of fields I want the U.K. to be leading in, U.K. Science Minister Amanda Solloway said.

The Hartree Centre was opened in 2012 by UK Research and Innovations STFC as an HPC, data analytics, and AI research facility. Its housed within Sci-Tech Daresburys laboratory for research in accelerator science, biomedicine, physics, chemistry, materials, engineering, computational science, and more.

The program is part of IBMs Discovery Accelerator initiative to accelerate discovery and innovation based on a convergence of advanced technologies at research centers like HNCDI, the company said. This will be IBMs first Discovery Accelerator research center in Europe.

As part of the HNCDI program, the STFC Hartree Center is joining over 150 global organizations, ranging from Fortune 500 companies to startups, with an IBM Hybrid Cloud-accessible connection to the IBM Quantum Network. The Quantum Network is the computing giants assembly of premium quantum computers and development tools. IBM will also provide access to its commercial and experimental AI products and tools for work in areas like material design, scaling and automation, supply chain logistics, and trusted AI applications, the company said.

IBM has been busy inking Discovery Accelerator deals with partners this year. The company last month made a $200 million investment in a 10-year joint project with the Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). As with the HNCDI in the U.K., the planned IBM-Illinois Discovery Accelerator Institute at UIUC will build out new research facilities and hire faculty and technicians.

Earlier this year, IBM announced a 10-year quantum computing collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic to build the computational foundation of the future Cleveland Clinic Global Center for Pathogen Research & Human Health. That project will see the installation of the first U.S.-based on-premises, private sector IBM Quantum System One, the company said. In the coming years, IBM also plans to install one of its first next-generation 1,000+ qubit quantum systems at another Cleveland client site.

The pandemic added urgency to the task of harnessing quantum computing, AI, and other cutting-edge technologies to help solve medicines most pressing problems, IBM chair and CEO Arvind Krishna said in March at the time of the Cleveland Clinic announcement.

The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned one of the greatest races in the history of scientific discovery one that demands unprecedented agility and speed, Krishna said in a statement.

At the same time, science is experiencing a change of its own with high-performance computing, hybrid cloud, data, AI, and quantum computing being used in new ways to break through long-standing bottlenecks in scientific discovery. Our new collaboration with Cleveland Clinic will combine their world-renowned expertise in health care and life sciences with IBMs next-generation technologies to make scientific discovery faster and the scope of that discovery larger than ever, Krishna said.

Go here to read the rest:
IBM partners with U.K. on $300M quantum computing research initiative - VentureBeat

Trinity College Dublins Dan Kilper and University of Arizonas Saikat Guha discuss the quantum cloud and how it could be achieved.

Quantum computing has been receiving a lot of attention in recent years as several web-scale providers race towards so-called quantum advantage the point at which a quantum computer is able to exceed the computing abilities of classical computing.

Large public sector investments worldwide have fuelled research activity within the academic community. The first claim of quantum advantage emerged in 2019 when Google, NASA and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) demonstrated a computation that the quantum computer completed in 200 seconds and that the ORNL supercomputer verified up to the point of quantum advantage, estimated to require 10,000 years to complete to the end.

Roadmaps that take quantum computers even further into this regime are advancing steadily. IBM has made quantum computers available for online access for many years now and recently Amazon and Microsoft started cloud services to provide access for users to several different quantum computing platforms. So, what comes next?

The step beyond access to a single quantum computer is access to a network of quantum computers. We are starting to see this emerge from the web or cloud-based quantum computers offered by cloud providers effectively quantum computing as a service, sometimes referred to as cloud-based quantum computing.

This consists of quantum computers connected by classical networks and exchanging classical information in the form of bits, or digital ones and zeros. When quantum computers are connected in this way, they each can perform separate quantum computations and return the classical results that the user is looking for.

It turns out that with quantum computers, there are other possibilities. Quantum computers perform operations on quantum bits, or qubits. It is possible for two quantum computers to exchange information in the form of qubits instead of classical bits. We refer to networks that transport qubits as quantum networks. If we can connect two or more quantum computers over a quantum network, then they will be able to combine their computations such that they might behave as a single larger quantum computer.

Quantum computing distributed over quantum networks thus has the potential to significantly enhance the computing power of quantum computers. In fact, if we had quantum networks today, many believe that we could immediately build large quantum computers far into the advantage regime simply by connecting many instances of todays quantum computers over a quantum network. With quantum networks built, and interconnected at various scales, we could build a quantum internet. And at the heart of this quantum internet, one would expect to find quantum computing clouds.

At present, scientists and engineers are still working on understanding how to construct such a quantum computing cloud. The key to quantum computing power is the number of qubits in the computer. These are typically micro-circuits or ions kept at cryogenic temperatures, near minus 273 degrees Celsius.

While these machines have been growing steadily in size, it is expected that they will eventually reach a practical size limit and therefore further computing power is likely to come from network connections across quantum computers within the data centre, very much like todays current classical computing data centres. Instead of racks of servers, one would expect rows of cryostats.

Quantum computing distributed over quantum networks has the potential to significantly enhance the computing power of quantum computers

Once we start imagining a quantum internet, we quickly realise that there are many software structures that we use in the classical internet that might need some type of analogue in the quantum internet.

Starting with the computers, we will need quantum operating systems and computing languages. This is complicated by the fact that quantum computers are still limited in size and not engineered to run operating systems and programming the way that we do in classical computers. Nevertheless, based on our understanding of how a quantum computer works, researchers have developed operating systems and programming languages that might be used once a quantum computer of sufficient power and functionality is able to run them.

Cloud computing and networking rely on other software technologies such as hypervisors, which manage how a computer is divided up into several virtual machines, and routing protocols to send data over the network. In fact, research is underway to develop each of these for the quantum internet. With quantum computer operating systems still under development, it is difficult to develop a hypervisor to run multiple operating systems on the same quantum computer as a classical hypervisor would.

By understanding the physical architecture of quantum computers, however, one can start to imagine how it might be organised to support different subsets of qubits to effectively run as separate quantum computers, potentially using different physical qubit technologies and employing different sub-architectures, within a single machine.

One important difference between quantum and classical computers and networks is that quantum computers can make use of classical computers to perform many of their functions. In fact, a quantum computer in itself is a tremendous feat of classical system engineering with many complex controls to set up and operate the quantum computations. This is a very different starting point from classical computers.

The same can be said for quantum networks, which have the classical internet to provide control functions to manage the network operations. It is likely that we will rely on classical computers and networks to operate their quantum analogues for some time. Just as a computer motherboard has many other types of electronics other than the microprocessor chip, it is likely that quantum computers will continue to rely on classical processors to do much of the mundane work behind their operation.

With the advent of the quantum internet, it is presumable that a quantum-signalling-equipped control plane might be able to support certain quantum network functions even more efficiently.

When talking about quantum computers and networks, scientists often refer to fault-tolerant operations. Fault tolerance is a particularly important step toward realising quantum cloud computing. Without fault tolerance, quantum operations are essentially single-shot computations that are initialised and then run to a stopping point that is limited by the accumulation of errors due to quantum memory lifetimes expiring as well as the noise that enters the system with each step in the computation.

Fault tolerance would allow for quantum operations to continue indefinitely with each result of a computation feeding the next. This is essential, for example, to run a computer operating system.

In the case of networks, loss and noise limit the distance that qubits can be transported on the order of 100km today. Fault tolerance through operations such as quantum error correction would allow for quantum networks to extend around the world. This is quite difficult for quantum networks because, unlike classical networks, quantum signals cannot be amplified.

We use amplifiers everywhere in classical networks to boost signals that are reduced due to losses, for example, from traveling down an optical fibre. If we boost a qubit signal with an optical amplifier, we would destroy its quantum properties. Instead, we need to build quantum repeaters to overcome signal losses and noise.

Together we have our sights set on realising the networks that will make up the quantum internet

If we can connect two fault-tolerant quantum computers at a distance that is less than the loss limits for the qubits, then the quantum error correction capabilities in the computers can in principle recover the quantum signal. If we build a chain of such quantum computers each passing quantum information to the next, then we can achieve the fault-tolerant quantum network that we need. This chain of computers linking together is reminiscent of the early classical internet when computers were used to route packets through the network. Today we use packet routers instead.

If you look under the hood of a packet router, it is composed of many powerful microprocessors that have replaced the computer routers and are much more efficient at the specific routing tasks involved. Thus, one might imagine a quantum analogue to the packet router, which would be a small purpose-built quantum computer designed for recovering and transmitting qubits through the network. These are what we refer to today as quantum repeaters, and with these quantum repeaters we could build a global quantum internet.

Currently there is much work underway to realise a fault-tolerant quantum repeater. Recently a team in the NSF Center for Quantum Networks (CQN)achieved an important milestone in that they were able to use a quantum memory to transmit a qubit beyond its usual loss limit. This is a building block for a quantum repeater. The SFI Connect Centre in Ireland is also working on classical network control systems that can be used to operate a network of such repeaters.

Together we have our sights set on realising the networks that will make up the quantum internet.

By Dan Kilper and Saikat Guha

Dan Kilper is professor of future communication networks at Trinity College Dublin and director of the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Connect research centre.

Saikat Guha is director of the NSF-ERC Center for Quantum Networks and professor of optical sciences, electrical and computer engineering, and applied mathematics at the University of Arizona.

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Looking to the future of quantum cloud computing - Siliconrepublic.com - Siliconrepublic.com