Nobel winner, HPE and chip industry firms team up to make a practical quantum supercomputer

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By Stephen Nellis

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) -John M. Martinis, one of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in physics for breakthroughs in quantum computing, on Monday formed an alliance with HPE and several chip firms to create a practical, mass-producible quantum supercomputer. 

Quantum computers hold the promise of solving problems in chemistry, medicine and other fields that would take classical computers thousands of years. 

Major tech firms such as IBM, Microsoft and Alphabet’s Google, where Martinis worked before co-founding his current startup Qolab, are all racing to develop the technology. 

But those efforts are largely one-offs, being built one computer at a time by small teams. The new group, called the Quantum Scaling Alliance, aims to build quantum computers that can be made with the same tools that churn out hundreds of millions of chips a year for smartphones, laptops or AI servers.

Since the early work in the field in the 1980s, quantum chips, which function using what are known as qubits, have been made “in an artisanal way”, small batches at a time, Martinis told Reuters in an interview. 

The alliance will include longtime chip industry suppliers such as Applied Materials, which makes chip manufacturing tools, and Synopsys, which makes chip design software, that will create bigger, more consistent quantum chips.

“At this point, we think it’s time to switch over to more of a standard professional model, and that’s using very sophisticated tools,” Martinis said.

As quantum chips are scaled up, they will need to be intertwined with classical computers for vital functions such as correcting errors that can disrupt the functioning of quantum circuits. 

But weaving together classical machines with existing supercomputers such as those made by HPE will not be simple, because there are few industry-wide standards for how to do so.

 Masoud Mohseni, a distinguished technologist leading the quantum team at HPE, worked with Martinis and three dozen other researchers on a blueprint for how to do so last year, a plan they will put into action with the consortium.

“People think, naively, that once you have a system that is hundreds (of qubits) or that if you make it to thousands, then you can make it to millions. That’s just not true,” Mohseni said in an interview. “At each scale, you face completely new challenges.” 

The other founders of the alliance are 1QBit, Quantum Machines, Riverlane and the University of Wisconsin.

(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Jan Harvey)