Fujitsu has launched the Fujitsu Quantum-inspired Computing Digital Annealer Cloud Service.
The new service leverages the Fujitsu Digital Annealer, a next-generation architecture inspired by quantum phenomena, for the high-speed resolution of combinatorial optimisation problems.
The service is available in Japan for now, and will be steadily rolled out to North America, Europe, and Asia during fiscal 2018.
The Digital Annealer Cloud Service promises to be useful in a wide variety of areas that cannot currently be handled by traditional computers due to the massive computational volume required.
This not only includes issues that companies in a range of industries face, such as speeding up the search of similarities in molecules for drug discovery, optimising portfolios in finance, personalizing advertisements in digital marketing, and optimizing the arrangement of warehoused components for factories and logistics, but also challenges confronting society at large, such as transportation congestion and disaster recovery planning.
In addition to deploying this new cloud service, Fujitsu is also launching the Fujitsu Digital Annealer Technical Service to support the application development for customers to define issues, as well as build and utilise mathematical models.
Background
As we reach the limits of conventional computing power and existing technologies’ ability to solve combinatorial optimization problems, expectations have been mounting around the continued development of quantum computers as the next generation of computing technology.
In today’s quantum computers (quantum annealing machines), there are enormous limitations with hardware, and there are a great many technical problems to overcome in order to easily solve problems at a practical scale.
To overcome this challenge, in 2016 Fujitsu Laboratories announced its Digital Annealer, an architecture dedicated for combinatorial optimisation problems, that has the advantages of digital circuitry, namely, a high degree of flexibility in design and noise resistance, as well as high speed inspired by quantum phenomena. Fujitsu has been working to develop services based on this technology.