IBM has opened its IBM Quantum Computation Centre in New York State, expanding its fleet of quantum computing systems for commercial and research activity that exist beyond the confines of experimental lab environments.
The IBM Quantum Computation Centre will support the growing needs of a community of over 150 000 registered users and nearly 80 commercial clients, academic institutions and research laboratories to advance quantum computing and explore practical applications.
The global community of users have run more than 14-million experiments on IBM’s quantum computers through the cloud since 2016, and published more than 200 scientific papers.
To meet growing demand for access to real quantum hardware, 10 quantum computing systems are now online through IBM’s Quantum Computation Center.
The fleet is now composed of five 20-qubit systems, one 14-qubit system, and four 5-qubit systems. Five of the systems now have a Quantum Volume of 16 – a measure of the power of a quantum computer – demonstrating a new sustained performance milestone.
IBM’s quantum systems are optimised for the reliability and reproducibility of programmable multi-qubit operations, enabling quantum computational research with 95% availability.
Within one month, IBM’s commercially available quantum fleet will grow to 14 systems, including a new 53-qubit quantum computer, the single largest universal quantum system made available for external access in the industry, to date. The new system offers a larger lattice and gives users the ability to run even more complex entanglement and connectivity experiments.
“Our strategy, since we put the very first quantum computer on the cloud in 2016, was to move quantum computing beyond isolated lab experiments conducted by a handful of organizations, into the hands of tens of thousands of users,” says Dario Gil, director of IBM Research.
“In order to empower an emerging quantum community of educators, researchers, and software developers that share a passion for revolutionising computing, we have built multiple generations of quantum processor platforms that we integrate into high-availability quantum systems. We iterate and improve the performance of our systems multiple times per year and this new 53-qubit system now incorporates the next family of processors on our roadmap.”
Advances in quantum computing could open the door to future scientific discoveries such as new medicines and materials, improvements in the optimisation of supply chains, and new ways to model financial data to make better investments.