D-Wave Quantum Inc. has announced a breakthrough in Quantum Computing, published in the journal Science. The paper, titled “Beyond-Classical Computation in Quantum Simulation,” confirms that D-Wave’s annealing quantum computer has achieved quantum computational supremacy on a practical problem, marking the first such demonstration on a useful real-world application.
The research involved simulating quantum dynamics in programmable spin glasses, which are complex magnetic materials simulation problems relevant to business and science. Scientists compared performance between D-Wave’s Advantage2 prototype annealing quantum computer and the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
D-Wave’s quantum computer completed the most complex simulation in minutes, achieving accuracy levels that would take the supercomputer nearly one million years and consume more than the world’s annual electricity to match. This achievement distinguishes itself from previous quantum supremacy claims, which were either disputed or involved impractical random number generation.
Magnetic materials simulations are crucial for technological advancement, with applications in medical imaging, electronics, superconductors, electrical networks, sensors, and motors. Traditional supercomputers and high-performance computing centers often lack the computational power to conduct such complex simulations efficiently.
The breakthrough was made possible through D-Wave’s 25 years of research, two years of collaboration across 11 institutions, and extensive computational resources. The company’s previous scientific milestones published in Nature Physics (2022) and Nature (2023) provided the theoretical and experimental foundation for this achievement, showing that quantum annealing offers quantum speedup in complex optimization problems.
The Advantage2 prototype that achieved this breakthrough is available to customers through D-Wave’s Leap real-time quantum cloud service. It represents significant improvements over previous generations, including increased qubit coherence, connectivity, and energy scale. D-Wave has since developed an even more powerful Advantage2 processor that is four times larger than the prototype used in this research, allowing for simulations with thousands of qubits rather than hundreds.
This achievement validates Richard Feynman’s vision of simulating nature on a quantum computer and opens new possibilities for scientific discovery and quantum application development in materials science.
