A couple of weeks ago, I navigated the holiday traffic from New York to the town of Yorktown Heights in suburban Westchester County, the location of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, to stand before perhaps the most advanced quantum computer in the world.
The IBM Quantum System Two is sheathed in gray metal, roughly the size and shape of an industrial refrigerator. Which makes sense — much of the architecture inside is composed of cooling equipment that keep the three IBM Heron quantum processors “colder than deep space,” as IBM senior vice president and director of research Darío Gil told me in an interview. Up close, it emits a quiet electronic hum.
The Quantum System Two looks forbidding, like some offspring of the supercomputer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, minus HAL’s eerie red eye. And it should — with hundreds of qubits, the quantum counterpart to classical computing bits, operating on three connected processors, the Quantum System Two represents a significant step forward in the very long path to bring quantum computing from the lab into the practical world, where such machines could one day solve problems that even the fastest classical supercomputers couldn’t crack in millions of years.
But appearances can be deceiving. The qubits that do the real work of quantum computing inside the System Two are as sensitive and as prone to error as the hardware itself looks indestructible. That’s why quantum computers need to be kept colder than cold — even the slightest increase in temperature or vibration or noise can cause qubits to drop out of the fickle quantum state that allows them to do their magic.
And that’s why as…
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