IBM touts “Quantum Serverless” as it envisions the path to 4,000+ qubits

IBM today updated its existing quantum computing roadmap, targeting a 4,000-plus qubit machine by 2025. Included in his plan is the orchestration for more powerful combinations of classical and quantum resources.

Such combinations, which include so-called “quantum-centric supercomputing,” will position the new quantum crew more firmly in the world of high-performance computing, where technologists are tackling some of humanity’s most pressing challenges.

IBM said it expects to provide software tools in 2023 that enable developers to run jobs that help them unlock both quantum and classical computing resources. IBM said it sees no let-up in the steady advance of quantum scaling.

The company uses the term “Serverless Quantum” to describe an architecture that provides an infrastructure that dedicates work to either classical or quantum processors.

“Serverless Quantum is part of the world’s preparation for quantum-centric supercomputing,” said Jerry Chow, IBM Fellow and Director of Quantum Infrastructure. He likened the effect to today’s elastic computing methods, “in the sense that you have computing resources as you need them.”

Speaking to VentureBeat, Chow said the idea is that parts of problems can be handled by either classical CPUs, GPUs, or non-classical QPUs or quantum processing units. This is made possible by a common service layer that efficiently orchestrates or arranges workload assignments.

Better hardware and software methods for communicating between chips are also important in this quest for quantum, Chow said while discussing future plans for quantum “knitting circuits.”

“This is where you can tackle bigger problems,” he said, “and find ways to break them down into small-order quantum circuits and knit or take all the results and put them back together.”

The problems envisioned are many and some seem particularly pressing.

For example, simulating nature with quantum systems is seen as a route to efficiencies that could lead to significant environmental, social and governance improvements.

Also, world governments are now seen in a race to succeed in quantum computing, as quantum systems could crack longstanding cryptographic coding practices. Viewers suggest that opposing governments are now collecting encrypted data to process when quantum breakthroughs occur.

Sticking to their circular knitting

IBM has indicated that Quantum serverless features in its Qiskit runtime software, including Circuit Knitting, will support the distribution of parallelizable work in 2023. Also, improvements in error mitigation and suppression should improve the quality of quantum results, the company said. For Qisket, these are scheduled for the years 2024 and 2025 as part of the roadmap.

The bird is the word when it comes to codenames for IBM quantum processors. Last year, IBM released a 127-qubit Eagle processor, which will be followed this year by Osprey, a 433-qubit processor. An increasingly powerful crowd of IBM qubit processors will follow. IBM’s roadmap envisages: a 133-qubit Heron processor to appear in 2023; a 462-qubit Flamingo processor in 2024; and the 4,158-qubit Kookaburra device in 2025.

While Heron’s qubit count may seem like a step backwards, piecing together clusters of qubit processors is important to IBM’s overall plans. This is critical to IBM’s claims of continuous scalability.

“What’s exciting about Heron is that it’s defined in a way that’s classically controllable [via] the same control hardware infrastructure. So that effectively means we’re going to have quantum computing with classical communications and classical parallelism,” said Chow, who is expected to further explain IBM’s quantum roadmap at the Inside Quantum Technology Conference 2022 in San Diego, California this week.

Quantum Timelines

Quantum computing schedules have been closely watched since qubits first emerged from the laboratory as part of physical experiments. A common joke is that now, just as it was at the turn of the century, “quantum computing is five to ten years away.”

However, according to Forrester Research analyst Brian Hopkins, IBM’s timelines for quantum computing have usually been realistic.

“IBM has the most detailed roadmap of any full-stack quantum computing vendor that I cover,” he told VentureBeat via email. “In addition, they create credibility in the market by completing roadmap milestones according to their plan.”

That gives Forresters Hopkins confidence in IBM’s 4,000-plus-qubit projections, though he stresses that IBM still refrains from making any meaningful predictions about when its computers and software will be able to deliver benefits — in the form of a positive ROI — to you to demonstrate problem area .

Hopkins goes on to say that this is valuable as the company will have greater credibility by demonstrating such an advantage.

“Even if we gain advantage in one problem area, it will still be many years before quantum computers are scalable and powerful enough to be applicable to the many areas where we see potential,” he said.

We love qubits – but….

Skepticism about quantum computing timelines is unlikely to abate, but elements of IBM’s new timeline suggest the technology may be advancing faster than some skeptics thought.

While “qubit counts” will grab headlines here and elsewhere, technological advances surrounding qubit research should be closely watched, as well as hybrids that adapt classical and quantum computing to different parts of problems.

“We love qubits – but the exact number isn’t as important as [the fact] that we have defined the path for the technology to continue to scale,” said Chow.