Inside IBM’s complex effort to create and scale next-gen quantum supercomputers

Researchers and engineers at IBM are hustling to build out a large-scale, fault-tolerant quantum supercomputer by 2029, according to a senior executive steering that work.

In the process, the team is generating cutting-edge devices that can no longer be modeled with classical computing architectures. And the company recognizes the U.S. government’s need for quantum-safe security measures.

“The next [four to five years are] probably going to be the most exciting time in quantum computing. You’ve gone from it being a scientific exploration into the hardware, to how do we actually start using these quantum computers to do real things and scale them up,” said Jay Gambetta, IBM’s vice president for quantum. 

A leading quantum computing expert with more than two decades of professional experience, Gambetta joined IBM in 2011 — about seven years after he moved to the U.S. from Australia. 

“I was the first to pull [an IBM-built] quantum computer onto the cloud” back in 2016, he said.

Gambetta recently hosted a small group of journalists at the company’s Washington, D.C., office for a roundtable to discuss some of IBM’s recent quantum computing advancements, and his team’s roadmap and vision for what’s to come.

“At a high level, the U.S. has as always been a leader in quantum computing, and as we go into this new, next phase, we have to remain a leader in both continuing to build the best quantum computers and also being the first to use them for useful applications,” he said.

Quantum computing is considered an alternative computational paradigm and, broadly, applies certain laws of physics to digital information processing. It’s part of the emerging and disruptive technology field of quantum information science (QIS) that uses complex phenomena happening at atomic and subatomic levels to store, transmit, manipulate, process and measure information.

The Defense Department and other federal agencies have been increasingly prioritizing quantum-enabling activities and investments as proponents largely predict it will lead to revolutionary breakthroughs — like an unhackable internet — in the not-so-distant future.

IBM is in a small cadre of major U.S. businesses, including Google and Microsoft, vying to be the first to generate a quantum system that can outperform all the classical computers that came before.

“The whole purpose of quantum computing, and the whole thesis of it, is that there are algorithms that exist that no classical computer can ever simulate. Most famous of it is Shor’s algorithm, but more practical in terms of commercial applications is simulating chemistry, simulating materials, simulating biology, simulating finance, doing some risk calculation, some optimization. They are the reason we’re all doing it,” he explained.

On the heels of recent innovations, IBM aims to start experimenting with using a quantum computer as a scientific tool to discover new algorithms. 

Gambetta noted that the field of AI optimization is based on heuristic algorithms, or those that use approximate solutions to puzzle out answers to complex problems.

“We, as a society, have benefited from algorithm discovery, and we continue to benefit from it. Now we have something that we’ve got to add to it. And I expect that in the next year or two, we will see legitimate demonstrations of quantum advantage or supremacy. I prefer the word ‘advantage,’ but you call it whatever you want. [But it means] where we’ll actually see a quantum computer do something cheaper, faster, or more cost-effective than the classical computer alignment,” he said. 

There’s been rising hype over the last decade around possibilities for the future of quantum. Gambetta acknowledged that, as well as critics’ responses, but said he’s confident IBM is on the cusp of some next-level breakthroughs.

“In some sense, to me, we’re in this most exciting time. We’re now getting devices that you can no longer simulate with classical computing,” he said.

Early government focus and investments from defense and intelligence research labs zoned in on proving the existence of quantum bits, or qubits, the basic unit of information used to encode data in quantum computing. 

The congressionally mandated National Quantum Initiative (NQI) enacted in 2018 accelerated U.S. progress when momentum was already swiftly building, Gambetta noted. And alongside new innovations in cloud access, it meant the government’s focus shifted from fundamental research science to puzzling out and pursuing more practical applications. 

“Now we have 100-qubit machines that are beyond what we can simulate. So, you can build whatever classical computer you want but you can’t simulate it to do the pen-and-paper algorithms that we all want to do for quantum computing,” he explained.

Leading experts are also now more serious than ever about ensuring the in-the-works advanced quantum systems are being built in a way that they can be quickly and safely linked up and scaled as soon as they’re fully realized.

“Quantum communication, quantum computing, quantum sensing — they were all kind of almost distinctly different [in the past]. But the future is going to actually be quantum computers connected to quantum sensors connected with quantum communication,” Gambetta said.

Responding to DefenseScoop’s questions at the roundtable, the quantum chief discussed some of the high-priority challenges that anticipated quantum innovations pose for the DOD and U.S. military. 

“One of the algorithms that quantum computers will break is RSA, which [underpins] a lot of our security,” Gambetta explained, referring to the widely used Rivest–Shamir–Adleman public-key cryptosystem for securing data transmissions.

“The quantum computers we’ve built today don’t break [it] because they’ve got to be bigger to do that. But we know, given our commercial roadmap, that will happen,” he said. “That’s why quantum computers obviously drive a lot of national security concerns.”

Led by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, government agencies are working to transition to more protected security architectures and uncover new quantum-safe algorithms that won’t be broken by the future supercomputers.

Quantum computing further holds promise to expand DOD’s ability to solve complex logistics problems. 

Gambetta noted the technology also “changes the equation for simulating materials,” which the Pentagon spends heaps of high-performance computing resources on.

“We know this future [of IBM-run fault-tolerant quantum computers] is coming. I think how the commercialization of this gets done is a complicated question, and it’s why we’re talking so much with the people in the government,” he said.