Let’s Get Practical*: D-Wave Details Product Expansion & Cross-Platform Roadmap

The Quantum Computing Company launches performance update, introduces new hybrid solvers, and broadens scope; now the only provider focused on delivering both annealing and gate-model quantum computers

BURNABY, British Columbia, Oct. 05, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- D-Wave Systems Inc., the leader in quantum computing systems, software, and services, today announced at their annual user conference, Qubits, a performance update to the Advantage™ quantum system, a new hybrid solver in the company’s Leap™ quantum cloud service, and a preview of its next-generation quantum computing platform that will include both annealing and gate-model quantum computers. The product releases and roadmap are designed to continue to bring the full breadth of quantum solutions to customers both today and into the future to accelerate adoption, usage, and customer value.

Available Now:

• Only one year after launching Advantage, a performance update with a new quantum processing unit (QPU) is available today in the Leap quantum cloud service. Building on the system’s 5000+ qubits and 15-way connectivity, the Advantage performance update includes a number of advancements that enable customers to solve larger and more complex problems with greater precision, finding better results 70% of the time on certain classes of problems.
• D-Wave unveiled the constrained quadratic model (CQM) solver – the newest addition to D-Wave’s family of quantum hybrid solvers in Leap. The CQM solver incorporates problem constraints into the solver, allowing users to benefit from a simplified expression of their constrained problems. This significantly expands the breadth and size of problems customers can solve with constraints, allowing enterprises to formulate even larger problems that run across classical and quantum systems and find the best answers to complex business problems.

Looking to the Future – The Clarity Roadmap:
Built on the company’s nearly 20-year track record of delivering ground-breaking technology innovations and powerful, usable quantum systems, software, and tools to market, the new roadmap, code-named Clarity, makes D-Wave the only quantum computing company to offer both annealing and gate-model quantum computers via an integrated, full stack quantum platform.

The Clarity roadmap incorporates:

• The next-generation Advantage 2™ quantum system with a new qubit design that enables 20-way connectivity in a new topology. The Advantage 2 QPU will contain 7000+ qubits and make use of the latest improvements in quantum coherence in a multi-layer fabrication stack, further harnessing the quantum mechanical power of the system for finding better solutions, faster.
• A new initiative to develop the industry’s first scalable and practical error-corrected gate-model computing system.
• More powerful hybrid solvers that expand use cases and bring the best of quantum and classical resources together.
• Cross-platform open-source developer tools, enabling customers to invest in one tools platform and use across multiple quantum systems.

Furthering Optimization with Quantum Annealing:
Quantum annealing is uniquely designed for optimization, both today and into the future. In fact, recent publications show that the classical processing overhead and lesser performance of gate-model systems on optimization problems make these systems ineffective on this class of problem (e.g. “Applying quantum algorithms to constraint satisfaction problems,”¹ “Noise-Induced Barren Plateaus in Variational Quantum Algorithms,”² and “Training variational quantum algorithms is NP-hard -- even for logarithmically many qubits and free fermionic systems”³). D-Wave’s ongoing commitment to, and investment in, annealing quantum computing technology will continue to accelerate performance and expand the ability for customers to get better solutions to complex optimization problems.

While D-Wave’s ongoing focus on improving its quantum annealing technology will continue to bring value to users interested in optimization, this path will also unlock new annealing-based applications including broader materials science applications, 5G and wireless use cases, and training of machine learning models.

Expanding Into Gate-Model Use Cases:
The company’s new gate-model quantum computing initiative is targeted at users who seek solutions for simulating quantum systems. By expanding into gate-model quantum systems, D-Wave’s quantum computing offerings will impact the lifecycles of industry: in pharmaceuticals, gate-model systems will assist with drug discovery, while annealing systems will ensure patient trial optimization, and in manufacturing, new meta materials will be designed with gate-model systems, while factory automation improvements will deliver those new products to market more efficiently using quantum annealing. To get there, Clarity places strong emphasis on solving for scalability and quantum processor architecture, both of which are key challenges to bringing a working gate-model technology to market and expanding the power of annealing quantum computing.

Getting Started Today:
Enterprises, governments, and developers who get started with D-Wave’s Leap quantum cloud service today benefit from the Advantage performance update and CQM solver to build in-production hybrid quantum applications now. The Clarity roadmap includes dual-path hardware and cross-platform services, software, and tools for even more quantum use cases in the future. Customers want a flexible array of quantum solutions and expect that their quantum investments will make sound business sense today, while needing trusted solutions for the longer term. Common tools in familiar programming languages and approachable interfaces maintain ease-of-use in both getting started and expanding in-production quantum application portfolios.

By expanding its product portfolio to include annealing and gate-model systems, D-Wave is the first quantum computing company to meet this cross-platform customer need.

“D-Wave's Advantage system has grown into a quantum technology that leads the world in the practice of computing using features of quantum mechanics. D-Wave has achieved this edge by wisely restricting its technology to the requirements of quantum annealing,” said Professor Doctor Kristel Michielsen, Group Leader, “Quantum Information Processing,” Forschungszentrum Jülich. “With its new initiative to engineer its first scalable and practical error-corrected gate-model quantum computing system, D-Wave is now expanding from this successful platform into the arena of general-purpose quantum computing. This fundamental step should enable D-Wave to cover the entire market of potential applications in the future and will make D-Wave an even more important partner for Jülich to work with on quantum research and to further advance practical quantum computing.”

“Customers want to be able to solve their hard problems using quantum computers. The delivery of a new Advantage performance update and quantum hybrid solver demonstrates our relentless focus on ongoing, on-time product delivery. And, we’ve taken what we’ve learned and built over the past 20 or so years and developed a quantum platform roadmap that will further the benefits of annealing quantum computing for optimization problems, while accelerating our ability to expand into other problem classes,” said Alan Baratz, CEO, D-Wave. “Clarity is what our customers have been asking for. Our full-stack approach to quantum technology, everything from chip fabrication to system development, and from hybrid software solvers to robust open-source developer tools, means that we’re the only company in the world that can both deliver on regular product innovations and bring a cross-platform stack to market quickly. That’s practical.”

To learn more about Clarity in an upcoming webinar, click here. To get started working with D-Wave today and find out more about our professional services on-board to quantum computing, D-Wave Launch, click here.

*Practical:

• “Of or concerned with the actual doing or use of something rather than with theory and ideas,”
• “(Of an idea, plan, or method) likely to succeed or be effective in real circumstances; feasible.”

About D-Wave Systems Inc.

D-Wave is the leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems, software and services and is the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers and the only company developing both annealing quantum computers and gate-model quantum computers. Our mission is to unlock the power of quantum computing for the world. We do this by delivering customer value with practical quantum applications for problems as diverse as logistics, artificial intelligence, materials sciences, drug discovery, scheduling, cybersecurity, fault detection, and financial modeling. D-Wave’s systems are being used by some of the world’s most advanced organizations, including NEC, Volkswagen, DENSO, Lockheed Martin, USC, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. With headquarters near Vancouver, Canada, D-Wave’s US operations are based in Palo Alto, CA. D-Wave has a blue-chip investor base including PSP Investments, Goldman Sachs, BDC Capital, NEC Corp., Aegis Group Partners, and In-Q-Tel. For more information, visit: www.dwavesys.com.

Contact
D-Wave Systems Inc.
dwave@launchsquad.com

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¹ E. Campbell, A. Khurana, A. Montenaro, “Applying quantum algorithms to constraint satisfaction problems”, Quantum 3, 167 (2019).
² Wang et al., “Noise induced barren plateaus in variational quantum algorithms” (2021)
³ M. Bittel and L. Kliesch, “Training variational quantum algorithms is NP-hard --- even for logarithmically many qubits and free fermionic systems” (2021) 

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