Quantum computing is still a realm in which researchers probably spend more time theorizing what tomorrow’s quantum computers will be capable of than leveraging today’s quantum computers on actual use cases, but the gap between theory and practicality may be closing more quickly than anyone expected.
The latest evidence of that could be found at the recent Quantum World Congress in Tysons, Virginia, where several companies made announcements demonstrating the readiness of quantum computers to tackle real-world use cases.
Among them, none other than Microsoft announced in a blog post by Jason Zander, executive vice president, Strategic Missions and Technologies at the company, that in collaboration with quantum computing firm Quantinuum it had used a “qubit virtualization system to create and entangle 12 highly reliable logical qubits.”
Also last week, Quantinuum, which is majority-owned by Honeywell, separately announced its own roadmap to “universal, fully fault-tolerant quantum computing by 2030,” a development plan which includes achieving 50 logical qubits by next year and hundreds more just four years after that. The 2030 goal is about half a decade ahead of the schedules some quantum computing firms were talking about even just a year ago.
What’s the significance of logical qubits and roadmaps for fault tolerance? Whereas early quantum computers were measured–and sometimes still are–by the number of physical qubits they could generate, these qubits often were considered to be “noisy” and unfit for reliably accurate computations. The new gold standard for the sector has become the pursuit of more reliable logical or error-corrected qubits. It generally takes many physical qubits to create just a few logical qubits, so the sector also has been innovating on ways to use fewer physical qubits to make this happen.
Zander claimed that the accomplishment of Microsoft and Quantinuum “represents the largest number of entangled logical qubits, with the highest fidelity, on record. These results scale logical qubit computation— on ion-trap hardware — within our Azure Quantum compute platform.” In a nod to demonstrating what that means for practical use cases, the pair also demonstrated “the first end-to-end chemistry simulation that combines reliable logical quantum computation with cloud high-performance computing and AI,” according to Zander’s post, which added, “This paves the way toward practical solutions at the intersection of these technologies, especially in the domains of chemistry, physics and life sciences.”
Microsoft is not new to quantum. The company was very vocal about its quantum research toward the end of the last decade, but grew quieter during the early part of this decade as more observers questioned the near-term commercial relevance of quantum computing. The company seemed to find its voice again in mid-2023 when CEO Satya Nadella said the company had ambitions to leverage quantum computing and AI together to help advance innovations in fields such as chemistry. It created an Azure Quantum Elements cloud-based portfolio for that purpose, and this past July added new generative AI computational chemistry tools to that offering.
During that same stretch of time, Microsoft also has been working on a qubit-virtualization system that it said could as much as triple the quantity of reliable logical qubits in an efficient manner while requiring smaller numbers of physical qubits. That work led directly to this week’s announcement.
The announcement also is significant for Quantinuum, whose CEO, Dr. Rajeeb Hazra stated, “The ability of our systems to triple the number of logical qubits while less than doubling our physical qubits from 30 to 56 physical qubits is a testament to the high fidelities and all-to-all connectivity of our H-Series trapped-ion hardware. Our current H2-1 hardware combined with Microsoft’s qubit-virtualization system is bringing us and our customers fully into Level 2 resilient quantum computing. This powerful collaboration will unlock even greater advancements when combined with the cutting-edge AI and HPC tools delivered through Azure Quantum.”
More evidence of quantum practicality
Another bit of research that arrived last week from BosonQ Psi (BQP), a start-up from India focused on quantum-based engineering simulations, shed more light on how logical qubits might be put to good use on practical business use cases.
The company used a hybrid quantum-classical solver which is part of its BQPhy simulation platform on a Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation. About 100,000 experiments resulted in the finding that a large-scale CFD simulation of a jet engine can be achieved with only 30 logical qubits on a quantum computer, leading to better accuracy, efficiency, and costs than current methods, the company said. A prior study, which BQP said inspired its research, found that about 19.2 million compute cores were required to perform this same simulation with classical algorithms on state-of-the-art HPCs.
“This study is pivotal as it would democratize large-scale CFD simulation for every engineer once quantum computers become utility-scale,” said BQP Founder, CEO, and Chief Scientific Officer Abhishek Chopra. “In the future, what would engineers have easier access to – 19.2 million HPC cores or 30-logical-qubit quantum computers? I bet on the latter.”
Asked by Fierce Electronics how soon such quantum computers could come to fruition, Chopra alluded to the announcements of Microsoft and Quantinuum. "It seems like the time to 30 logical qubits is sooner than what we thought, potentially 2025,” he said. “This is based on the roadmap released by Quantinuum which stated that a 50-logical qubit quantum computer will be released in 2025."