Quantum Computing Delivered From The Cloud

NCOIC Discusses e-Discovery and Cloud Computing

By G C Network | March 22, 2010

Last week during its weekly meeting, the NCOIC Cloud Computing Working Group (CCWG) examined some of the legal aspects surrounding electronically stored information. With government use of cloud computing expected…

Take the survey, get a book!

By G C Network | March 20, 2010

“Cloud Musings”, in cooperation with Aditya Yadav & Associates, is conducting a new cloud computing survey. This short, eight (8) question poll, is designed to gauge general corporate plans around…

Army Knowledge Leaders Study Cloud Computing

By G C Network | March 12, 2010

This week it was my pleasure to explore cloud computing with Army Knowledge Leaders (AKL) ! AKL is an intensive 2 year experience of training and work rotations designed to develop leadership,…

Northrop Grumman & Lockheed Martin Selected for CANES

By G C Network | March 9, 2010

   Last week the US Navy awarded initial CANES contracts to Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin. Navy officials place the contract values at $775M for Northrop and $937M for Lockheed.…

NCOIC Analyses Cloud Computing With SCOPE

By G C Network | February 24, 2010

Last week, the Network Centric Operations Consortium (NCOIC) Cloud Computing Working Group (CCWG) started it’s work on cloud interoperability in earnest. The first step in their process is the completion…

TASER Awarded: The NGA ASP/ISP Transition Contract

By G C Network | February 17, 2010

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) has awarded the Total Application Services for Enterprise Requirements (TASER) contract to: Accenture National Security Services, LLC BAE Systems Information Technology, Inc. The Boeing Company-Autometric,…

EuroCloud Expands Quickly

By G C Network | February 16, 2010

Last October I introduced EuroCloud as a pan-European business network with the goal of promoting European use of cloud computing.  In the intervening three months, the organization has grown to…

Joining NJVC: A Professional Plateau

By G C Network | February 8, 2010

This week I begin a new and exciting phase of my professional career by joining the NJVC Enterprise Management Team! For those unfamiliar, NJVC is one of the largest information…

DoD Deputy CIO on Secure Information Sharing

By G C Network | February 3, 2010

Today on Federal Executive Forum, Dave Wennergren, Deputy CIO, Office of the Secretary of Defense, shared his views on secure information sharing. Mr. David M. Wennergren serves as the Deputy…

Training Conference: Cloud Computing for DoD & Government

By G C Network | February 1, 2010

Please join me at the Cloud Computing for DoD & Government training conference, February 22-24, 2010 at the Hilton Old Town in Alexandria, VA. This unique conference agenda blends interactive…

Photo credit: Shutterstock

IBM Cloud is now providing developers with the infrastructure and portal to a 5 qubit quantum computer. This equips them with the ability to build interfaces between classic computers and IBM’s quantum platform.
Quantum computers make direct use of quantum-mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement to perform operations on data. Quantum computers are different from binary digital electronic computers based on transistors. Whereas common digital computing requires that the data be encoded into binary digits (bits), each of which is always in one of two definite states (0 or 1), quantum computation uses quantum bits, which can be in superpositions of states.


IBM also announced today:
  • The release of a new API (Application Program Interface) for the IBM Quantum Experience that enables developers and programmers to begin building interfaces between its existing five quantum bit (qubit) cloud-based quantum computer and classical computers, without needing a deep background in quantum physics.
  • The release of an upgraded simulator on the IBM Quantum Experience that can model circuits with up to 20 qubits. In the first half of 2017, IBM plans to release a full SDK (Software Development Kit) on the IBM Quantum Experience for users to build simple quantum applications and software programs.

The IBM Quantum Experience enables anyone to connect to IBM’s quantum processor via the IBM Cloud, to run algorithms and experiments, work with the individual quantum bits, and explore tutorials and simulations around what might be possible with quantum computing. Since its launch less than a year ago, about 40,000 users have run over 275,000 experiments on the IBM Quantum Experience. It has become an enablement tool for scientists in over 100 countries and, to date, 15 third-party research papers have been posted to arXiv with five published in leading journals based on experiments run on the Quantum Experience.

The broad availability of quantum computing capability could prove to be a significant blow to current data encryption practices. In 2015 the US National Security Agency actually advised US agencies and businesses to prepare for a time when the cryptography protecting virtually all e-mail, medical and financial records, and online transactions would be rendered obsolete by quantum computing. The US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) is also running a competition to spur work on post-quantum algorithms.

IBM intends to build IBM Q systems to expand the application domain of quantum computing. A key metric will be the power of a quantum computer expressed by the “Quantum Volume”, which includes the number of qubits, quality of quantum operations, qubit connectivity and parallelism. As a first step to increase Quantum Volume, IBM aims at constructing commercial IBM Q systems with ~50 qubits in the next few years to demonstrate capabilities beyond today’s classical systems, and plans to collaborate with key industry partners to develop applications that exploit the quantum speedup of the systems.
Future applications of quantum computing could include:
  • Drug and Materials Discovery: Untangling the complexity of molecular and chemical interactions leading to the discovery of new medicines and materials;
  • Supply Chain & Logistics: Finding the optimal path across global systems of systems for ultra-efficient logistics and supply chains, such as optimizing fleet operations for deliveries during the holiday season;
  • Financial Services: Finding new ways to model financial data and isolating key global risk factors to make better investments;
  • Artificial Intelligence: Making facets of artificial intelligence such as machine learning much more powerful when data sets can be too big such as searching images or video; or
  • Cloud Security: Making cloud computing more secure by using the laws of quantum physics to enhance private data safety.

This content is being syndicated through multiple channels. The opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not represent the views of GovCloud Network, GovCloud Network Partners or any other corporation or organization.

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