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Category Archives: Quantum Computing

Highest-performing quantum simulator IN THE WORLD delivered to Japan – TechGeek

Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, introduced the worlds first commercially available quantum simulator capable of simulating up to 40 quantum bits, or Qubits, which translates to very fucking fast.

The simulator, named Atos Quantum Learning Machine, is powered by an ultra-compact supercomputer and a universal programming language.

Quantum computing is a key priority for Japan. It launched a dedicated ten-year, 30 billion yen (.. aka US$280 million / AUD$433 million) quantum research program in 2017, followed by a 100 billion yen (.. aka US$900 million / AUD $1 billion) investment into its Moonshot R&D Program one focus of which will be to create a fault-tolerant universal quantum computer to revolutionise the economy, industry, and security sectors by 2050.

Were delighted to have sold our first QLM in Japan, thanks to our strong working partnership with Intelligent Wave Inc.. We are proud to be part of this growing momentum as the country plans to boost innovation through quantum

Combining a high-powered, ultra-compact machine with a universal programming language, the Atos Quantum Learning Machine (enables researchers and engineers to develop an experiment with quantum software. It is the worlds only quantum software development and simulation appliance for the coming quantum computer era.

It simulates the laws of physics, which are at the very heart of quantum computing, to compute the exact execution of a quantum program with double-digit precision.

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America Is in a New Cold War and This Time the Communists Might Win – Newsweek

It had been a bedrock belief of U.S. policy for 40 years that it was possible to bring the People's Republic of China smoothly into the family of nationsand now, one of the architects of that policy was finally acknowledging the obvious.

In a speech six months ago, former World Bank President and Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick reminded listeners of his own famous 2005 call on Beijing to become a "responsible stakeholder." He ticked off a few of the ways in which China had done just that: voting for sanctions on North Korea and limiting missile exports, for instance. But he acknowledged that the project had gone off the rails.

"Xi Jinping's leadership," Zoellick said of the PRC president, "has prioritized the Communist Party and restricted openness and debate in China. China hurts itself by forging a role model for dystopian societies of intrusive technologies and reeducation camps." He added: "The rule of law and openness upon which Hong Kong's 'One Country, Two Systems' model rests may topple or be trampled. If China crushes Hong Kong, China will wound itselfeconomically and psychologicallyfor a long time."

Zoellick had that right. A global pandemic has brought relations between Beijing and Washington to its lowest point since China reopened to the world in 1978even lower even than in those extraordinary days following the 1989 Tiananmen massacre.

What had been a more confrontational, trade-centric relationship since the start of President Donald Trump's term, has now descended into bitterness in the midst of a presidential reelection campaign Trump fears is slipping away. Any chance that the pandemic might spur Washington and Beijing to set differences aside and work together on treatments and other aspects of the pandemicsuch as how exactly it startedis long gone.

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Last week, the Trump administration moved to block shipments of semiconductors to Huawei Technologies. The Commerce Department said it was amending an export rule to "strategically target Huawei's acquisition of semiconductors that are the direct product of certain U.S. software and technology." Previously on May 13, the FBI announced an investigation into Chinese hackers that it believes are targeting American health care and pharmaceutical companies in an effort to steal intellectual property relating to coronavirus medicines. Without specifying how, the Bureau said the hacks may be disrupting progress on medical research.

President Trump had already made it clear just how bitter he is at Beijing on May 7 when meeting with reporters at the White House. "We went through the worst attack we've ever had on our country," he said, "this is the worst attack we've ever had. This is worse than Pearl Harbor, this is worse than the World Trade Center. There's never been an attack like this. And it should have never happened. Could've been stopped at the source. Could've been stopped in China...And it wasn't."

The comparison of a virus, which originated in China and then spread globally, to the two most infamous attacks in U.S. history, stunned Trump's foreign policy adviserseven Beijing hard-liners. It will be impossible, U.S. officials acknowledge, for Trump to soften his hard line toward Beijing should he win reelection in November.

The president is right to reach for historical metaphor, given the weight of the moment. But the aftermath of the Wuhan outbreak more closely resembles the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 than either Pearl Harbor or 9/11. What follows will not be a sharp burst of savage conflict, but a global scramble to shape the new order rising from the rubble of old. As with the Wall, the forces that led to the dispute over the Wuhan outbreak were unleashed years before the events that made history. And the change they represent is likely irreversible, no matter who sits in the White House.

Though Joe Biden has on occasion downplayed Beijing's rise as a threat to the U.S., and for sure would not be so rhetorically reckless as Trump, his foreign policy advisers acknowledge there's no turning back. Since Xi Jinping came to power seven years ago, China has imprisoned more than one million ethnic Muslims in "reeducation" camps, imposed an ever-tightening surveillance state on its own citizens and cracked down on all dissent. Overseas, Beijing's goal is to entice authoritarian regimes in the developing world to view it as a "model'' to be followed. And, of course, selling the technology those leaders need to create their own surveillance states.

"No one on either side of the political aisle in Washington is ignoring any of that," says one Biden adviser. "The era of hope that China might evolve into a normal country is over. No one with any brains denies that."

That notion has fully settled in here. Sixty-six percent of Americans now have a negative view of China, according to a recent Pew Research poll. At the same time, in China, state-owned media and a government-controlled internet whip up nationalism and anti-Americanism to levels unseen since the U.S. accidentally bombed Beijing's embassy in Belgrade during the Balkan wars in 1999.The world's two most powerful nations are now competing in every realm possible: militarily, for one, with constant cat-and-mouse games in the South China Sea and cyber warfare. The competition to dominate the key technologies of the 21st century is intensifying, too. This type of rivalry hasn't been seen since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

Thus, a growing number of policymakers, current and former, and China hands old and new, acknowledge the obvious: Cold War 2.0 is here. To the generation of Americans who remember duck-and-cover drills in elementary school at the peak of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the new global struggle will look very different. It will also, many U.S. strategists believe, be much harder for the West to wage successfully. "Another long twilight struggle may be upon us," says former Pentagon China planner Joseph Bosco, "and it may make the last one look easy."Now, U.S. policymakers are trying to discern what that struggle will look like, and how to win it.

New-Age War

The first major difference in the coming Cold War with Beijing is in the military realm. Beijing spends far less than the U.S. on its military, though its annual rate of spending is fast increasing. According to the Center For Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, Beijing spent $50 billion on its military in 2001, the year it joined the World Trade Organization. In 2019 it spent $240 billion, compared to the U.S.' $633 billion.

For a few decades at least, the U.S.-China military competition will look vastly different from the hair-trigger nuclear standoff with Moscow. Instead, China will seek asymmetric advantages, rooted where possible in technology. It has, for example, already developed an arsenal of hypersonic missiles, which fly low and are hard for radar to detect. They are known as "carrier killers" because of their ability to strike U.S. aircraft carriers in the Pacific from long distances. These weapons could be critical in "area denial" operations, as military planners put it. For example, should the day come when Beijing seeks to take Taiwan by force, hyper-sonics could keep U.S. carriers far from the island nation once a war began.

China's pursuit of preeminence across a wide range of technologies, in areas like quantum computing and artificial intelligence, are central to the economic clash with the U.S. But they also have significant military components. Since the 1990s, when Chinese military planners were stunned by the U.S.' lightning victory in the first Iraq war, they have consistently focused their efforts on developing war-fighting capabilities relevant to their immediate strategic goalsTaiwan is an examplewhile creating the ability to one day leapfrog U.S. military technologies.That may be drawing nearer. Quantum computing is an example. In an era in which digital networks underpin virtually every aspect of war, "quantum is king," says Elsa Kania, a former DOD official who is now a Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. Take cyber warfarethe ability to protect against an enemy disrupting your own networks, while maintaining the ability to disrupt the adversary's. Quantum networks are far more secure against cyber espionage, and Kania believes China's "future quantum capacity has the potential to leapfrog U.S. cyber capabilities."

That's not the only advantage of quantum technology. Beijing is also exploring the potential for quantum-based radar systems that can defeat stealth technology, a critical U.S. war-fighting advantage. "These disruptive technologiesquantum communications, quantum computing and potentially quantum radarmay have the potential to undermine cornerstones of U.S. technological dominance in information-age warfare, its sophisticated intelligence apparatus, satellites and secure communications networks and stealth technologies," says Kania. "China's concentrated pursuit of quantum technologies could have much more far-reaching impacts than the asymmetric approach to defense that has characterized its strategic posture thus far." That is a big reason why Pan Jianwei, the father of China's quantum computing research effort, has said the nation's goal is nothing less than "quantum supremacy."

Washington, and its allies in East Asia and Europe, are paying attention. In a just-published bookThe Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the WestDavid Kilcullen, a former Australian military officer who served as special adviser to U.S. General David Petraeus in Iraq, writes: "our enemies have caught up or overtaken us in critical technologies, or have expanded their concept of war beyond the narrow boundaries within which our traditional approach can be brought to bear. They have adapted, and unless we too adapt, our decline is only a matter of time."

The book is being widely read in U.S. national security circles.China is not yet a "peer power," as U.S. national defense analysts put it. But the steadily aggressive pursuit of quantum technologiesand a wide array of others that also have dual-use applicationsincreasingly convince Pentagon planners that Beijing will one day be one. China, says Michael Pillsbury, one of Trump's key informal advisers on relations with Beijing, "is nothing if not patient." The year 2049 will mark the Chinese Communist Party's 100th anniversary of taking power in Beijing. That's the year Chinese propaganda outlets have said will see the completion of China's rise to the dominant power on earth.

An Economic Divorce?

The most significant difference in the emerging geopolitical standoff between Washington and Beijing is obvious: China is economically powerful, and deeply integrated with both the developed and developing worlds. That was never the case with the former Soviet Union, which was largely isolated economically, trading only with its east bloc neighbors. China, by contrast, trades with everyone, and it continues to grow richer. It is sophisticated across a wide range of critical technologies, including telecommunications and artificial intelligence. It has set as a national goalin its so-called Made in China 2025 planpreeminence not just in quantum computing and AI, but in biotech, advanced telecommunications, green energy and a host of others.

But the U.S. and the rest of the world have problems in the present as well. The pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of locating supply chains for personal protective equipment as well as pharmaceutical supplies in China. That's a significant strategic vulnerability. If China shut the door on exports of medicines and their key ingredients and raw material, U.S. hospitals, military hospitals and clinics would cease to function within months if not days, says Rosemary Gibson, author of a book on the subject, China Rx. Late last month, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton introduced legislation mandating that U.S. pharmaceutical companies bring production back from China to the U.S.

China's explicit desire to dominate the industries of the future is bad news for foreign multinational companies that have staked so much on the allure of the China market. If China's steep rise up the technology ladder continues, American and other foreign multinationals are likely to get turfed out of the market entirely. "China 2025 is all about replacing anything that American companies sell of any value, just taking the Americans out of that," says Stewart Paterson, author of China, Trade and Power, Why the West's Economic Engagement Has Failed.Donald Trump's tariffs, and China's public desire to dominate key industries, have pushed American multinational and U.S. policymakers to ask: should the U.S. get an economic divorce from Beijing? And if so, what would that look like?

The COVID-19 outbreak and China's response to it has greatly intensified that debate. Trump's trade war had triggered a slow-motion move toward an economic "decoupling," as companies in low-tech, low- margin industries began to move production out of China to avoid tariffs. The textile, footwear and furniture business have all seen significant movement out of China so far. But pre-pandemic, there was no mad rush for the exits and there was no reason to expect one anytime soon. As recently as last October, 66 percent of American companies operating in China surveyed by the American Chamber of Commerce in Beijing said "decoupling" would be impossible, so interlinked are the world's two largest economies.

Things have changed. The number who now believe decoupling is impossible, according to the same survey, has dropped to 44 percent. If reelected, Trump's advisers say, the president will likely pressure other industries beyond pharmaceuticals and medical equipment to bring back production. How he would actually do that is unclear, but aides are looking at the example of Japan. The Japanese legislature recently approved a program in which the government will offer subsidiesup to $2.25 billion worthto any company that brings its supply chain back home.

As negative perceptions of China harden in the U.S., executives are faced with a stark choice: as Paterson puts it, "do you really want to be seen doing business with an adversary?"

The answer isn't that easy. In the U.S., a lot of companies simply do not want to reduce their exposure to China. They spent yearsand billionsbuilding up supply lines and are loath to give them up. Consider the semiconductor industry, a critical area in which the U.S. is still technologically more advanced than China. A complete cessation of semiconductor sales to China would mean U.S. firms lose about 18 percent of their global market shareand an estimated 37 percent of overall revenues. That in turn would likely force reductions in research and development. The U.S. spent $312 billion on R&D over the last decade, more than double the amount spent by its foreign competitorsand it's that R&D which allows them to stay ahead of competitors.

Paterson argues that the costs of total divorce from China is often overstated. He calculates that about 2 percent of U.S. corporate profits come from sales in the Chinese market, mostly from companies that manufacture there in order to sell there. Corporate profits overall are 10 percent of U.S. GDP. Eliminating the China portion of that "is a rounding error," he says.

But getting companies such as Caterpillar Inc., which operates 30 factories in China and gets 10 percent of its annual revenue from sales there, is an uphill lift. There are scores of companies like Caterpillar, who have no intention of leaving China, even if relations between Washington and Beijing are at new lows. And there are also scores of companies like Starbucks, which operates 42,000 stores across China, or Walmart, whose revenue in the country is more than $10 billion annually. Those companies don't have critical technology to steal and may be little worry to the U.S. if they continue to operate in China.

But other companies do. Tesla, to take one example, is a company whose advanced technology should be protected at all costs. Which is why some in Washington are scratching their heads at both Elon Musk and the Trump administration. Musk said on May 10th that he was so angry at the shutdown orders in the state of California, he might move the Tesla factory in Fremont to Texas. Meanwhile, he manufactures his cars in Shanghai, which is an obvious target for intellectual property theft and industrial espionage, given that electric vehicles are one of the industries targeted in the China 2025 plan. "California bad, Shanghai good is not a formulation that's going to hold up well in the post-COVID environment," says Paterson.

A smarter U.S. strategy than "divorce" is "economic distancing," says John Lee, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank. The goal of U.S. industrial policy should be "ensuring that China is not in a position to dominate key technologies and assume the leading role in dominating supply and value chains for these emerging technologies," he says. Rationing access to large and advanced markets is critical. "It becomes much more challenging [for Beijing] if China's access to markets in the U.S. Europe and East Asia is restricted, and it is denied key inputs from those areas."

That presumes coordination with allies, which has not been a Trump administration strong suit. But that would change under a President Joe Biden. Even before the pandemic, key European and Asian allies were souring on their relations with China. That includes Canada as well. A former senior Canadian official said Ottawa wanted to work with Trump and the Europeans to map out a tougher, united front on trade. The only problem? "You were sanctioning our steel exports on 'national security grounds,'" this official says. "We are a NATO ally, for godssake!"

The opportunity to work more closely to form a united front versus Beijing is something Biden advisers are intent on doing. A reconfigured Trans Pacific Partnership, which Barack Obama pushed, is likely the first order of business in a Biden administrationthis time more explicitly targeted at excluding Beijing from free trade deals among U.S. allies.That is, if there is a Biden administration.

What's Next?

In the context of the new Cold War, the move toward a smart economic distancing, as Hudson's Lee and others call for, will gain momentum. "Washington put too much faith in its power to shape China's trajectory. All sides of the policy debate [in the U.S.] erred," says Kurt Campbell, former assistant secretary of state under Obama. Biden's people are already spreading the word that there will be no return to the laissez faire attitudes that governed Washington's approach to China. The U.S. may also have to overtly subsidize companies in the Made in China 2025 industries that Beijing has targeted.

Beijing had resisted suspending its own industrial subsidies to state-owned industries in the Trump trade negotiations and had shown few signs of backing off from the goals expressed in Made in China 2025. In the wake of the global fury kicked up by the coronavirus, an economic rapprochement appears unthinkable.Militarily and geopolitically, no matter who wins the next election, the U.S. will work hard to bring India, which has hedged its bets between Washington and Beijing as China rose, more closely into the fold of a "free and open Indo-Pacific," as the Trump administration has called its policy toward Asia. The ability to work more closely with allies, both in East Asia and in Europe, in creating a united front against Beijing has never been stronger.

"No one that we talk to is happy," says Rand Corporation's Scott Harold.

What many look for is steadier and clearer public messaging from Washington. As Harold puts it, as the ideological competition with Beijing intensifies, "the defenders of the liberal international order, like-minded democracies, should grow more active in defense of their interests and values.''

In the wake of the pandemic, the U.S. is suffering a defeat that should be unthinkable: it is losing the propaganda war, particularly in the developing world. Both internally and abroad, the Chinese Communist party's propaganda outlets, digital and broadcast, are trumpeting Xi Jinping's handling of COVID-19, and contrasting it with the Trump administration's shambolic efforts to deal with the virus. State media outlets chronicled how badly the U.S. and others have managed the crisis. Their message: Those countries should copy China's model.

As competition between the United States and China grows, the information wars will be critical. In this, the "America First" Trump administration has been mostly AWOLthe President has not been able to rouse himself to support pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong, so desperate was he for a trade deal with Xi Jinping. But, Trump and Biden have some good role models and, thus, there's hope. U.S. presidents have defended the country's values quite well, and steadily, throughout the last Cold War, none more ably than Ronald Reagan, who left office a year before the Berlin Wall came down.

We will see, of course, if the next administration is up for the fight. Washington has at least recognized, as Kurt Campbell observes, that it overvalued its ability to influence China's development" Presumably it won't make that mistake again. Instead, Washington and its allies need to focus more on how to cope effectively with a powerful rival.

The mission: Wage the 21st century's Cold War, while ensuring it never turns hot.

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America Is in a New Cold War and This Time the Communists Might Win - Newsweek

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Quantum computing analytics: Put this on your IT roadmap – TechRepublic

Quantum is the next step toward the future of analytics and computing. Is your organization ready for it?

Quantum computing can solve challenges that modern computers can't--or it might take them a billion years to do so. It can crack any encryption and make your data completely safe. Google reports that it has seen a quantum computer that performed at least 100 million times faster than any classical computer in its lab.

Quantum blows away the processing of data and algorithms on conventional computers because of its ability to operate on electrical circuits that can be in more than one state at once. A quantum computer operates on Qubits (quantum bits) instead of on the standard bits that are used in conventional computing.

SEE: Managing AI and ML in the enterprise 2020: Tech leaders increase project development and implementation (TechRepublic Premium)

Quantum results can quickly make an impact on life science and pharmaceutical companies, for financial institutions evaluating portfolio risks, and for other organizations that want to expedite time-to-results for processing that on conventional computing platforms would take days to complete.

Few corporate CEOs are comfortable trying to explain to their boards what quantum computing is and why it is important to invest in it.

"There are three major areas where we see immediate corporate engagement with quantum computing," said Christopher Savoie, CEO and co-founder of Zapata Quantum Computing Software Company, a quantum computing solutions provider backed by Honeywell. "These areas are machine learning, optimization problems, and molecular simulation."

Savoie said quantum computing can bring better results in machine learning than conventional computing because of its speed. This rapid processing of data enables a machine learning application to consume large amounts of multi-dimensional data that can generate more sophisticated models of a particular problem or phenomenon under study.

SEE: Forget quantum supremacy: This quantum-computing milestone could be just as important (TechRepublic)

Quantum computing is also well suited for solving problems in optimization. "The mathematics of optimization in supply and distribution chains is highly complex," Savoie said. "You can optimize five nodes of a supply chain with conventional computing, but what about 15 nodes with over 85 million different routes? Add to this the optimization of work processes and people, and you have a very complex problem that can be overwhelming for a conventional computing approach."

A third application area is molecular simulation in chemistry and pharmaceuticals, which can be quite complex.

In each of these cases, models of circumstances, events, and problems can be rapidly developed and evaluated from a variety of dimensions that collate data from many diverse sources into a model.

SEE:Inside UPS: The logistics company's never-ending digital transformation (free PDF)(TechRepublic)

"The current COVID-19 crisis is a prime example," Savoie said. "Bill Gates knew in 2015 that handling such a pandemic would present enormous challengesbut until recently, we didn't have the models to understand the complexities of those challenges."

For those engaging in quantum computing and analytics today, the relative newness of the technology presents its own share of glitches. This makes it important to have quantum computing experts on board. For this reason, most early adopter companies elect to go to the cloud for their quantum computing, partnering with a vendor that has the specialized expertise needed to run and maintain quantum analytics.

SEE: Rural America is in the midst of a mental health crisis. Tech could help some patients see a way forward. (cover story PDF) (TechRepublic)

"These companies typically use a Kubernetes cluster and management stack on premises," Savoie said. "They code a quantum circuit that contains information on how operations are to be performed on quantum qubits. From there, the circuit and the prepared data are sent to the cloud, which performs the quantum operations on the data. The data is processed in the cloud and sent back to the on-prem stack, and the process repeats itself until processing is complete."

Savoie estimated that broad adoption of quantum computing for analytics will occur within a three- to five-year timeframe, with early innovators in sectors like oil and gas, and chemistry, that already understand the value of the technology and are adopting sooner.

"Whether or not you adopt quantum analytics now, you should minimally have it on your IT roadmap," Savoie said. "Quantum computing is a bit like the COVID-19 crisis. At first, there were only two deaths; then two weeks later, there were ten thousand. Quantum computing and analytics is a highly disruptive technology that can exponentially advance some companies over others."

Learn the latest news and best practices about data science, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence. Delivered Mondays

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Quantum computing analytics: Put this on your IT roadmap - TechRepublic

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Video: The Future of Quantum Computing with IBM – insideHPC

Dario Gil from IBM Research

In this video, Dario Gil from IBM shares results from the IBM Quantum Challenge and describes how you can access and program quantum computers on the IBM Cloud today.

From May 4-8, we invited people from around the world to participate in the IBM Quantum Challengeon the IBM Cloud. We devised the Challenge as a global event to celebrateour fourth anniversary of having a real quantum computer on the cloud. Over those four days 1,745people from45countries came together to solve four problems ranging from introductory topics in quantum computing, to understanding how to mitigate noise in a real system, to learning about historic work inquantum cryptography, to seeing how close they could come to the best optimization result for a quantum circuit.

Those working in the Challenge joined all those who regularly make use of the 18quantum computing systems that IBM has on the cloud, includingthe 10 open systemsand the advanced machines available within theIBM Q Network. During the 96 hours of the Challenge, the total use of the 18 IBM Quantum systems on the IBM Cloud exceeded 1 billion circuits a day. Together, we made history every day the cloud users of the IBM Quantum systems made and then extended what can absolutely be called a world record in computing.

Every day we extend the science of quantum computing and advance engineering to build more powerful devices and systems. Weve put new two new systems on the cloud in the last month, and so our fleet of quantum systems on the cloud is getting bigger and better. Well be extending this cloud infrastructure later this year by installing quantum systems inGermanyand inJapan. Weve also gone more and more digital with our users with videos, online education, social media, Slack community discussions, and, of course, the Challenge.

Dr. Dario Gil is the Director of IBM Research, one of the worlds largest and most influential corporate research labs. IBM Research is a global organization with over 3,000 researchers at 12 laboratories on six continents advancing the future of computing. Dr. Gil leads innovation efforts at IBM, directing research strategies in Quantum, AI, Hybrid Cloud, Security, Industry Solutions, and Semiconductors and Systems. Dr. Gil is the 12th Director in its 74-year history. Prior to his current appointment, Dr. Gil served as Chief Operating Officer of IBM Research and the Vice President of AI and Quantum Computing, areas in which he continues to have broad responsibilities across IBM. Under his leadership, IBM was the first company in the world to build programmable quantum computers and make them universally available through the cloud. An advocate of collaborative research models, he co-chairs the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a pioneering industrial-academic laboratory with a portfolio of more than 50 projects focused on advancing fundamental AI research to the broad benefit of industry and society.

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Seeqc UK Awarded 1.8M in Grants to Advance Quantum Computing Initiatives – HPCwire

LONDON Seeqc, the Digital Quantum Computing company, announced its UK team has been selected to receive two British grants totaling 1.8 million (~$2.1 million) from Innovate UKs Industrial Challenge Strategy Fund.

Quantum Foundry

The first 800,000 grant from Innovate UK is part of a 7M project dedicated to advancing the commercialization of superconducting technology. Its goal is to bring quantum computing closer to business-applicable solutions, cost-efficiently and at scale.

Seeqc UK is joining six UK-based companies and universities in a consortium to collaborate on the initiative. This is the first concerted effort to bring all leading experts across industry and academia together to advance the development of quantum technologies in the UK.

Othergrant recipientsinclude Oxford Quantum Circuits, Oxford Instruments, Kelvin Nanotechnology, University of Glasgow and the Royal Holloway University of London.

Quantum Operating System

The second 1 million grant is part of a 7.6 million seven-organization consortium dedicated to advancing the commercialization of quantum computers in the UK by building a highly innovative quantum operating system. A quantum operating system, Deltaflow.OS, will be installed on all quantum computers in the UK in order to accelerate the commercialization and collaboration of the British quantum computing community. The universal operating system promises to greatly increase the performance and accessibility of quantum computers in the UK.

Seeqc UK is joined by othergrant recipients, Riverlane, Hitachi Europe, Universal Quantum, Duality Quantum Photonics, Oxford Ionics, and Oxford Quantum Circuits, along with UK-based chip designer, ARM, and the National Physical Laboratory.

Advancing Digital Quantum Computing

Seeqc owns and operates a multi-layer superconductive electronics chip fabrication facility, which is among the most advanced in the world. The foundry serves as a testing and benchmarking facility for Seeqc and the global quantum community to deliver quantum technologies for specific use cases. This foundry and expertise will be critical to the success of the grants. Seeqcs Digital Quantum Computing solution is designed to manage and control qubits in quantum computers in a way that is cost-efficient and scalable for real-world business applications in industries such as pharmaceuticals, logistics and chemical manufacturing.

Seeqcs participation in these new industry-leading British grants accelerates our work in making quantum computing useful, commercially and at scale, said Dr. Matthew Hutchings, chief product officer and co-founder at Seeqc, Inc. We are looking forward to applying our deep expertise in design, testing and manufacturing of quantum-ready superconductors, along with our resource-efficient approach to qubit control and readout to this collaborative development of quantum circuits.

We strongly support the Deltaflow.OS initiative and believe Seeqc can provide a strong contribution to both consortiums work and advance quantum technologies from the lab and into the hands of businesses via ultra-focused and problem-specific quantum computers, continued Hutchings.

Seeqcs solution combines classical and quantum computing to form an all-digital architecture through a system-on-a-chip design that utilizes 10-40 GHz superconductive classical co-processing to address the efficiency, stability and cost issues endemic to quantum computing systems.

Seeqc is receiving the nearly $2.3 million in grant funding weeks after closing its $6.8 million seed round from investors including BlueYard Capital, Cambium, NewLab and the Partnership Fund for New York City. The recent funding round is in addition to a $5 million investment from M Ventures, the strategic corporate venture capital arm of Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany.

About Seeqc

Seeqc is developing the first fully digital quantum computing platform for global businesses. Seeqc combines classical and quantum technologies to address the efficiency, stability and cost issues endemic to quantum computing systems. The company applies classical and quantum technology through digital readout and control technology and a unique chip-scale architecture. Seeqcs quantum system provides the energy- and cost-efficiency, speed and digital control required to make quantum computing useful and bring the first commercially-scalable, problem-specific quantum computing applications to market.

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Seeqc UK Awarded 1.8M in Grants to Advance Quantum Computing Initiatives - HPCwire

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David Graves to Head New Research at PPPL for Plasma Applications in Industry and Quantum Information Science – Quantaneo, the Quantum Computing…

Graves, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1986, is an expert in plasma applications in semiconductor manufacturing. He will become the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratorys (PPPL) first associate laboratory director for Low-Temperature Plasma Surface Interactions, effective June 1. He will likely begin his new position from his home in Lafayette, California, in the East Bay region of San Francisco.

He will lead a collaborative research effort to not only understand and measure how plasma is used in the manufacture of computer chips, but also to explore how plasma could be used to help fabricate powerful quantum computing devices over the next decade.

This is the apex of our thrust into becoming a multipurpose lab, said Steve Cowley, PPPL director, who recruited Graves. Working with Princeton University, and with industry and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), we are going to make a big push to do research that will help us understand how you can manufacture at the scale of a nanometer. A nanometer, one-billionth of a meter, is about ten thousand times less than the width of a human hair.

The new initiative will draw on PPPLs expertise in low temperature plasmas, diagnostics, and modeling. At the same time, it will work closely with plasma semiconductor equipment industries and will collaborate with Princeton University experts in various departments, including chemical and biological engineering, electrical engineering, materials science, and physics. In particular, collaborations with PRISM (the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials) are planned, Cowley said. I want to see us more tightly bound to the University in some areas because that way we get cross-fertilization, he said.

Graves will also have an appointment as professor in the Princeton University Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, starting July 1. He is retiring from his position at Berkeley at the end of this semester. He is currently writing a book (Plasma Biology) on plasma applications in biology and medicine. He said he changed his retirement plans to take the position at PPPL and Princeton University. This seemed like a great opportunity, Graves said. Theres a lot we can do at a national laboratory where theres bigger scale, world-class colleagues, powerful computers and other world-class facilities.

Exciting new direction for the Lab

Graves is already working with Jon Menard, PPPL deputy director for research, on the strategic plan for the new research initiative over the next five years. Its a really exciting new direction for the Lab that will build upon our unique expertise in diagnosing and simulating low-temperature plasmas, Menard said. It also brings us much closer to the university and industry, which is great for everyone.

The staff will grow over the next five years and PPPL is recruiting for an expert in nano-fabrication and quantum devices. The first planned research would use converted PPPL laboratory space fitted with equipment provided by industry. Subsequent work would use laboratory space at PRISM on Princeton Universitys campus. In the longer term, researchers in the growing group would have brand new laboratory and office space as a central part the Princeton Plasma Innovation Center (PPIC), a new building planned at PPPL.

Physicists Yevgeny Raitses, principal investigator for the Princeton Collaborative Low Temperature Plasma Research Facility (PCRF) and head of the Laboratory for Plasma Nanosynthesis, and Igor Kavanovich, co-principal investigator of PCRF, are both internationally-known experts in low temperature plasmas who have forged recent partnerships between PPPL and various industry partners. The new initiative builds on their work, Cowley said.

A priority research area

Research aimed at developing quantum information science (QIS) is a priority for the DOE. Quantum computers could be very powerful in solving complex scientific problems, including simulating quantum behavior in material or chemical systems. QIS could also have applications in quantum communication, especially in encryption, and quantum sensing. It could potentially have an impact in areas such as national security. A key question is whether plasma-based fabrication tools commonly used today will play a role in fabricating quantum devices in the future, Menard said. There are huge implications in that area, Menard said. We want to be part of that.

Graves is an expert on applying molecular dynamics simulations to low temperature plasma-surface interactions. These simulations are used to understand how plasma-generated ions, atoms and molecules interact with various surfaces. He has extensive research experience in academia and industry in plasma-related semiconductor manufacturing. That expertise will be useful for understanding how to make very fine structures and circuits at the nanometer, sub-nanometer and even atom-by-atom level, Menard said. Davids going to bring a lot of modeling and fundamental understanding to that process. That, paired with our expertise and measurement capabilities, should make us unique in the U.S. in terms of what we can do in this area.

Graves was born in Daytona Beach, Florida, and moved a lot as a child because his father was in the U.S. Air Force. He lived in Homestead, Florida; near Kansas City, Missouri; and in North Bay Ontario; and finished high school near Phoenix, Arizona.

Graves received bachelors and masters degrees in chemical engineering from the University of Arizona and went on to pursue a doctoral degree in the subject, graduating with a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1986. He is a fellow of the Institute of Physics and the American Vacuum Society. He is the author or co-author of more than 280 peer-reviewed publications. During his long career at Berkeley, he has supervised 30 Ph.D. students and 26 post-doctoral students, many of whom are now in leadership positions in industry and academia.

A leader since the 1990s

Graves has been a leader in the use of plasma in the semiconductor industry since the 1990s. In 1996, he co-chaired a National Research Council (NRC) workshop and co-edited the NRCs Database Needs for Modeling and Simulation of Plasma Processing. In 2008, he performed a similar role for a DOE workshop on low-temperature plasmas applications resulting in the report Low Temperature Plasma Science Challenges for the Next Decade.

Graves is an admitted Francophile who speaks (near) fluent French and has spent long stretches of time in France as a researcher. He was named Matre de Recherche (master of research) at the cole Polytechnic in Palaiseau, France, in 2006. He was an invited researcher at the University of Perpignan in 2010 and received a chaire dexcellence from the Nanoscience Foundation in Grenoble, France, to study plasma-graphene interactions.

He has received numerous honors during his career. He was appointed the first Lam Research Distinguished Chair in Semiconductor Processing at Berkeley for 2011-2016. More recently, he received the Will Allis Prize in Ionized Gas from the American Physical Society in 2014 and the 2017 Nishizawa Award, associated with the Dry Process Symposium in Japan. In 2019, he was appointed foreign expert at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China. He served as the first senior editor of IEEE Transactions on Radiation and Plasma Medical Science.

Graves has been married for 35 years to Sue Graves, who recently retired from the City of Lafayette, where she worked in the school bus program. The couple has three adult children. Graves enjoys bicycling and yoga and the couple loves to travel. They also enjoy hiking, visiting museums, listening to jazz music, and going to the theater.

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David Graves to Head New Research at PPPL for Plasma Applications in Industry and Quantum Information Science - Quantaneo, the Quantum Computing...

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