Quantum effects of D-Waves hardware boost its performance – Ars Technica
Enlarge / The D-Wave hardware is, quite literally, a black box.
D-Wave
Before we had developed the first qubit, theoreticians had done the work that showed that a sufficiently powerful gate-based quantum computer would be able to perform calculations that could not realistically be done on traditional computing hardware. All that is needed is to build hardware capable of implementing the theorists' work.
The situation was essentially reversed when it came to quantum annealing. D-Wave started building hardware that could perform quantum annealing without a strong theoretical understanding of how its performance would compare to standard computing hardware. And, for practical calculations, the hardware has sometimes been outperformed by more traditional algorithms.
On Wednesday, however, a team of researchers, some at D-Wave, others at academic institutions, is releasing a paper comparing its quantum annealer with different methods of simulating its behavior. The results show that actual hardware has a clear advantage over simulations, though there are two caveats: errors start to cause the hardware to deviate from ideal performance, and it's not clear how well this performance edge translates to practical calculations.
D-Wave's hardware consists of a collection of loops of superconducting wires. Current can circulate through the loops in either direction, with the direction providing a bit value. Each loop is also connected to several of its neighbors, allowing them to influence each other's behavior.
When properly configured, the system can behave as what's called a "spin glass," a physical system with complex behavior. A spin glass is easiest to think about as a grid of magnets, with each magnet influencing the behavior of its neighbors. When one magnet is in a given orientation (like spin up), it becomes more energetically favorable for its neighbors to have the opposite orientation (spin down). If you start with a disordered systema spin glassthen the influence of each magnet on its neighbors will cause spins to flip as the system tries to find a path to the lowest energy state, called the ground state.
This process is called thermal annealing, and it has some limits. In a standard spin glass, it's possible to end up in situations where every path to the ground state goes through a high-energy barrier. This can trap the system in a local minimum instead of allowing it to evolve into the ground state.
D-Wave's system, however, shows quantum behavior. This allows it to undergo tunneling, where it passes between two low-energy states without ever occupying intervening high-energy states. So, quantum annealing is expected to have better overall performance than thermal annealing.
The behavior of spin glasses has been studied separately from D-Wave's hardware because they can be used to model a variety of physical processes. But the company's business is based on the fact that it's possible to map a variety of optimization problems onto the behavior of a spin glass. In these cases, having the spin glass find its ground state is the mathematical equivalent of finding the optimal solution to a problem.
But again, we lack the theoretical understanding of whether it's possible to get these solutions in some other way that's faster or more efficient.
To get a better sense of how its hardware performed, the research team started by validating the D-Wave hardware using a small spin glass consisting of only 16 spins. "At this scale we can numerically evolve the time-dependent Schrdinger equation," the researchers write, meaning that the behavior of the system during quantum annealing could be directly calculated. That was compared to the same process running on a small corner of one of D-Wave's Advantage processors, which have roughly 5,000 individual qubits. (They actually ran 100 of these 16-spin systems in parallel on the processor.)
These results confirmed that the D-Wave processor undergoes the expected quantum annealing process. In fact, they found that the results generated by the D-Wave processor were a better match for the Schrdinger calculations than either of two ways we can model annealing: either simulated thermal annealing, or simulated quantum annealing.
With that validation in hand, the team turned to much larger spin glasses, consisting of thousands of spins. At this point, it's no longer realistic to use Schrdinger's equations: "Simulating the Schrdinger dynamics of QA with a classical computer is an unpromising optimization method, as memory requirements grow exponentially with system size." Instead, the researchers compared D-Wave's hardware to simulated annealing and simulated quantum annealing.
Both the actual hardware and the simulators all showed a similar behavior, in that the energy gap between the system and its ground state decayed exponentially as a function of annealing time. Put differently, the system starts in a relatively high-energy state, and the energy gap between that and the ground state gets smaller as a function of time raised to a power.
The key difference between the methods is the exponentthe bigger the exponent, the faster the system approaches its ground state. Simulated quantum annealing had a higher exponent than simulated thermal annealing, while the D-Wave machine had a higher exponent than either of them. And that indicates that doing quantum annealing in D-Wave's hardware will get to a solution considerably faster than simulated annealing can.
The one problem identified in the study came when the researchers explored how the system scaled with the number of spins being tracked. For both simulations, there was a consistent relationship between annealing time and the amount of energy left in the system. By contrast, the performance of the D-Wave hardware tailed off slightly, bringing it somewhat closer to the performance of the simulated quantum annealing. This is a product of a loss of coherence in the systemin essence, errors crop up and keep the hardware from behaving as a single quantum system.
The results are still closer to optimal than the ones that are produced in this time by either of the annealing simulations. But the scaling isn't as good as it is when the system retains its coherence. And D-Wave has indicated that improving coherence is a goal for its next generation of processors.
While spin glasses are interesting to physicists, D-Wave is selling time on its systems as a way to solve optimization problems more generallyspecifically those with practical implications. But it's difficult to translate the results in this paper to these practical problems, though the team suggests that's the next step: "Extending this characterization of quantum dynamics to industry-relevant optimization problems, which generally do not enable analysis via universal critical exponents or finite-size scaling, would mark an important next step in practical quantum computing."
Put more simply, Andrew King, director of performance research at D-Wave, told Ars that "industrial problems generally don't even have a well-defined notion of scaling in the same way that these spin glasses do."
"For industrial problems, I can say that problem A has more variables than problem B, but there may be other confounding factors that make problem B harder for unexpected reasons," King said. In addition, there are some cases where highly specialized algorithms can outperform a general optimization approach, at least as long as the size of the problem remains small enough.
Despite the practical uncertainty, the empirical demonstration of a scaling advantage in quantum annealing hardware would seem to settle what had been an open question about D-Wave's hardware.
Nature, 2023. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05867-2 (About DOIs).
See original here:
Quantum effects of D-Waves hardware boost its performance - Ars Technica
- D-Wave and Davidson Technologies Near Installation Completion of Alabamas First On-Site Annealing Quantum Computer - Yahoo Finance - April 25th, 2025 [April 25th, 2025]
- IQM to install Polands first superconducting quantum computer - The Next Web - April 25th, 2025 [April 25th, 2025]
- IQM to Deploy Polands First Superconducting Quantum Computer - Business Wire - April 25th, 2025 [April 25th, 2025]
- Poland installs its first superconducting quantum computer - Tech.eu - April 25th, 2025 [April 25th, 2025]
- A quantum internet is much closer to reality thanks to the world's first operating system for quantum computers - Live Science - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- Where Will Rigetti Computing Be in 10 Years? - Yahoo Finance - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- D-Wave and Davidson Near Installation Completion of Alabamas First On-Site Annealing Quantum Computer - HPCwire - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- Quantum Computer Breakthrough: Fujitsu and RIKEN Lead the Way - JAPAN Forward - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- Fujitsu and RIKEN develop world-leading 256-qubit superconducting quantum computer - Capacity Media - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- 3 Reasons to Buy This Artificial Intelligence (AI) Quantum Computing Stock on the Dip - Yahoo Finance - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- New Mexico Wants to Be the Heart of Quantum Computing - WSJ - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- IonQ and Toyota Tsusho Align to Distibute Quantum Computing Solutions Across Japanese Industries - The Quantum Insider - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- Where Will Rigetti Computing Be in 10 Years? - The Motley Fool - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- EeroQ Named The 2025 MSU Startup Of The Year - Yahoo Finance - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- New QPU benchmark will show when quantum computers surpass existing computing capabilities, scientists say - Live Science - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- "We've Reached the Future": Xanadu Unleashes the First Scalable Photonic Quantum Computer, Redefining Tech Boundaries in a $100 Billion Race... - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- Fujitsu and Riken develop world-leading quantum computer - The Japan Times - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- No Killer App Yet? Why Quantum Needs Theorists More Than Ever - The Quantum Insider - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- Rigetti, Riverlane, and NQCC Awarded 3.5M ($4.7M USD) Innovate UK Grant to Advance Real-Time Quantum Error Correction - Quantum Computing Report - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- The key to 'cat qubits' 160-times more reliable lies in 'squeezing' them, scientists discover - Live Science - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- The mind-bending innovations that built quantum computing - C&EN - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- Mysterious phenomenon first predicted 50 years ago finally observed, and could give quantum computing a major boost - Live Science - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- Big Tech has officially entered its quantum era here's what it means for the industry - Business Insider - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- This Is My Top Quantum Computing Stock for 2025, and It's Not IonQ or Rigetti Computing - The Motley Fool - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- How Urgent Is The Quantum Computing Risk Facing Bitcoin? One Team Is Putting 1 BTC Up For Grabs To Find Out - Benzinga - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- Classiq and Wolfram Join CERNs Open Quantum Institute to Advance Hybrid Quantum Optimization for Smart Grids - Quantum Computing Report - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- New quantum breakthrough could transform computing and communication - The Brighter Side of News - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- Benchmarking the performance of quantum computing software for quantum circuit creation, manipulation and compilation - Nature - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- A new hybrid platform for quantum simulation of magnetism - Google Research - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- Why CoreWeave, Quantum Computing, and Digital Turbine Plunged Today - The Motley Fool - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- The race is on for supremacy in quantum computing - The Times - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- Project 11 challenges everyone to crack the Bitcoin key using a quantum computer. The reward is 1 BTC - Crypto News - April 23rd, 2025 [April 23rd, 2025]
- 7 Reasons You Should Care About World Quantum Day - Maryland Today - April 16th, 2025 [April 16th, 2025]
- Want to Invest in Quantum Computing? 3 Stocks That Are Great Buys Right Now. - Nasdaq - April 16th, 2025 [April 16th, 2025]
- Quantum utility is at most 10 years away, industry experts believe - The Next Web - April 16th, 2025 [April 16th, 2025]
- We stepped inside IQMs quantum lab to witness a new frontier in computing - The Next Web - April 16th, 2025 [April 16th, 2025]
- Quantum Shift: Rewiring the Tech Landscape - infoq.com - April 16th, 2025 [April 16th, 2025]
- Roadmap for commercial adoption of quantum computing gains clarity - Computer Weekly - April 16th, 2025 [April 16th, 2025]
- Want to Invest in Quantum Computing? 3 Stocks That Are Great Buys Right Now. - The Motley Fool - April 16th, 2025 [April 16th, 2025]
- Quantum walks: What they are and how they can change the world - The Brighter Side of News - April 16th, 2025 [April 16th, 2025]
- A timeline of the most important events in quantum mechanics - New Scientist - April 16th, 2025 [April 16th, 2025]
- Crafting the Quantum Narrative: A How-To for Press Releases - Quantum Computing Report - April 16th, 2025 [April 16th, 2025]
- IonQ signs MOU with Japans G-QuAT to expand access to quantum computing and strengthen APAC collaboration - The Quantum Insider - April 16th, 2025 [April 16th, 2025]
- Preparing for quantum advantage while addressing its unique threat to cybersecurity - SDxCentral - April 16th, 2025 [April 16th, 2025]
- IONQ of the U.S., a leading company in quantum computing, will develop quantum network technology in.. - - April 16th, 2025 [April 16th, 2025]
- Impact of tariffs on tech prices, the promise of quantum computing, and new state historic places - WPR - April 16th, 2025 [April 16th, 2025]
- 1 No-Brainer Quantum Computing Stock Down 60% to Buy on the Dip in 2025 - 24/7 Wall St. - April 16th, 2025 [April 16th, 2025]
- Physicists put Schrdinger's cat in a microwave and the quantum experiment actually worked - Yahoo - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- A week at Yale devoted to quantum, quantum, and more quantum - Yale News - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- US military launches initiative to find the best quantum computer - New Scientist - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- Proving quantum computers have the edge - Phys.org - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- 3 Quantum Computing Stocks Poised for Explosive Growth - The Motley Fool - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- DARPA begins scaling a quantum computer with 15 companies - Nextgov - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- New DARPA Initiative Challenges the Creation of Operational Quantum Computers - AFCEA International - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- Qolab Spearheads Hardware Development for DARPA's Quantum Benchmarking Initiative - Business Wire - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- Want to Invest in Quantum Computing? 3 Stocks That Are Great Buys Right Now - The Globe and Mail - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- A Useful Quantum Computer Within 10 Years? DARPA, 2 Australian Startups & More Are Working On It - TechRepublic - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- Where Schrdingers cat came from and why its getting fatter - New Scientist - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- Rigetti and IonQ Selected for U.S. Quantum Initiative. Moving From Hype to Prototype. - Barron's - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- A Tangled Benchmark: Using the Jones Polynomial to Test Quantum Hardware at Scale - The Quantum Insider - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- The dream of quantum computing is closer than ever | The Excerpt - USA Today - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- Analysts Still Have a Near-Perfect Rating on This Strong Buy Quantum Computing Stock - The Globe and Mail - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- Building Indias First Quantum Computer, a Foreign-Returned Physicist Battles the Bureaucracy - outlookbusiness.com - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- Quantum computing drives innovation in AI and cloud tech - SiliconANGLE - April 12th, 2025 [April 12th, 2025]
- Delfts Quantware paves the way to the million-qubit quantum computer - Bits&Chips - April 8th, 2025 [April 8th, 2025]
- What's Going On With IonQ Stock Today? - Benzinga - April 1st, 2025 [April 1st, 2025]
- Quantum computer solves optimization problem at Ford's assembly line - Interesting Engineering - April 1st, 2025 [April 1st, 2025]
- Finnish Quantum Startup IQM in Talks to Raise Over 200 Million - Bloomberg.com - April 1st, 2025 [April 1st, 2025]
- Quantum Computing Approach Generates First Ever Truly Random Number - Discover Magazine - April 1st, 2025 [April 1st, 2025]
- National Quantum Computing Centre Launches Insights Paper Exploring Quantum Computings Transformative Potential in Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals -... - April 1st, 2025 [April 1st, 2025]
- JPMorganChase, Quantinuum, Argonne National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and University of Texas at Austin advance the application of... - April 1st, 2025 [April 1st, 2025]
- Certified randomness using a trapped-ion quantum processor - Nature - April 1st, 2025 [April 1st, 2025]
- What's Going On With Quantum Computing Stock Today? - Benzinga - April 1st, 2025 [April 1st, 2025]
- D-Wave Pushes Back At Critics, Shows Off Aggressive Quantum Roadmap - The Next Platform - April 1st, 2025 [April 1st, 2025]
- Quantum Computing Inc. Secures Quantum Photonic Vibrometer Order with Delft University of Technology - Yahoo Finance - April 1st, 2025 [April 1st, 2025]
- How quantum cybersecurity changes the way you protect data - TechTarget - April 1st, 2025 [April 1st, 2025]
- Pasqal Selected for 140-Qubit Quantum Computer to Be Hosted at CINECA - insideHPC - April 1st, 2025 [April 1st, 2025]
- D-Wave and Japan Tobacco use quantum to build a better AI model for drug discovery - SiliconANGLE - April 1st, 2025 [April 1st, 2025]
- Quantum Computing is a cross industry revolution, and we want to be part of it - CTech - April 1st, 2025 [April 1st, 2025]
- Quantum Computing Stocks Fall. Here's A Look At Upcoming News Events. - Investor's Business Daily - April 1st, 2025 [April 1st, 2025]