D-Wave Systems, Inc. is a technology company, based in Burnaby, British Columbia. On January 19, 2007, it announced a working prototype of a commercially-viable quantum computer.
The prototype is, according to D-Wave, a 16-qubit adiabatic quantum computer, which they demonstrated on February 13th, 2007 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. (The second demo of the prototype was on February 15th, 2007 at the Telus World of Science in Vancouver, BC.)
D-Wave is a spinoff from the
department of Physics and Astronomy at University of British Columbia. Its mission is to commercialize superconducting quantum computers. Historically, it operated within a global collaborative network of research scientists. The company is backed by private investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and
Harris & Harris. D-Wave demonstrated what they claimed to be a 28-qubit adiabatic quantum computer on November 12, 2007
[http://www.dwavesys.com/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=9&cntnt01origid=15&cntnt01returnid=21]. The chip was fabbed at the Jet Propulsion Lab?s microdevices lab in Pasadena
[http://dwave.wordpress.com/2007/11/09/a-picture-of-the-demo-chip/].
Establishment
D-Wave was founded by
Haig Farris (chair of board),
Geordie Rose (CTO and former CEO), Bob Wiens (former CFO), and
Alexandre Zagoskin (former VP Research and Chief Scientist). Farris taught an entrepreneurship course at UBC, where Rose obtained his Ph.D. and Zagoskin was a postdoctoral fellow. The company name refers to their first qubit designs, which used d-wave superconductors.
D-Wave operated as an offshoot from UBC, while maintaining ties with the
department of Physics and Astronomy. It funded academic research in quantum computing, thus building a collaborative network of research scientists. The company collaborated with several universities and institutions, including UBC, IPHT Jena, Université de Sherbrooke, University of Toronto, University of Twente, Chalmers University of Technology, and University of Erlangen. These researchers worked with D-Wave scientists and engineers. Most of D-Wave's peer-reviewed technical publications come from this period. Some publications have D-Wave employees as authors, while others include employees of their partners as well or only. As of 2005, these partnerships and resulting technical papers were no longer listed on D-Wave?s website.
As of 2007, a full text search for "D-Wave Systems Inc." in the physics subject area of the arXiv.org preprint server returns 72 hits.
D-Wave operated from various locations in Vancouver and laboratory spaces at UBC before moving to its current location in the neighboring suburb of Burnaby.
Orion demonstration
On February 13th, 2007, D-Wave demonstrated the Orion system, running three different applications at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. This marked the first public demonstration of a quantum computer and associated service.
The first application, an example of pattern matching, performed a search for a similar compound to a known drug within a database of molecules. The next application computed a seating arrangement for an event subject to compatibilities and incompatibilities between guests. The last involved solving a Sudoku puzzle.
Orion description
The processors at the heart of D-Wave's "Orion quantum computing system" are hardware accelerators designed to solve a particular NP-complete problem related to the two dimensional Ising model in a magnetic field.
It is, according to D-Wave, a 16-qubit superconducting adiabatic quantum computer processor.
According to the company, a conventional front end running an application that requires the solution of an NP-complete problem, such as pattern matching, passes the problem to the Orion system. However, the company does not make the claim its systems can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time.
According to Dr. Geordie Rose, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of D-Wave, NP-complete problems "are probably not exactly solvable, no matter how big, fast or advanced computers get" so the adiabatic quantum computer used by the Orion system is intended to quickly compute an approximate solution.
Criticism
D-Wave has been heavily criticized by some scientists in the quantum computing field. According to
Scott Aaronson, who has a PhD in computer science, D-Wave's demonstration did not prove anything about the workings of the computer. He claimed a useful quantum computer would require a huge breakthrough in physics, which has not been published or shared with the physics community.
Dr. Aaronson has maintained or updated his criticisms on his blog.
See also
- Adiabatic quantum computation
- Analog computer
- Flux qubit
References
External links
Computer hardware companiesTechnology companiesQuantum information science
