Speaker
Dr
Daniel Lidar
(University of Southern California)
Description
Quantum information processing holds great promise, yet large-scale, general purpose
“universal" quantum computers capable of solving hard problems are not yet available
despite 20+ years of immense worldwide effort. However, special purpose quantum
information processors, such as the quantum simulators originally envisioned by
Feynman, appear to be within reach. Another type of special purpose quantum
information processor is a quantum annealer, designed to speed up the solution to
classical optimization problems. In October 2011 USC and Lockheed-Martin jointly
founded a quantum computing center housing a commercial quantum annealer built by D-
Wave Systems. Starting with 108 qubits, two generations later the current processor at
USC has 1098 qubits, and the latest generation deployed elsewhere already has close to
2048 qubits. These processors use superconducting flux qubits to try to find the ground
states of Ising spin-glass problems with as many spins as qubits, an NP-hard problem with
numerous applications. There has been much controversy surrounding the D-Wave
processors, concerning whether they are sufficiently quantum to offer any advantage over
classical computing. After introducing quantum annealing I will survey the work we have
done to test the D-Wave processors for quantum effects, to test for quantum
enhancements by benchmarking against highly optimized classical algorithms, and to
perform error correction.
Primary author
Dr
Daniel Lidar
(University of Southern California)