D-Wave Systems

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

D-Wave Systems Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	1999
Headquarters	Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
Key people	Herb Martin, CEO Geordie Rose, CTO Haig Farris, Chair
Industry	Computer hardware
Products	(currently none publicly available)
Revenue	N/A
Net income	N/A
Employees	>25
Subsidiaries	???
Website	www.dwavesys.com

D-Wave Systems, Inc. is a technology company, based in Burnaby, British Columbia, that gained news attention when it announced on January 19, 2007 that it had a working prototype of a commercially-viable quantum computer. The prototype is claimed to be a small (16-qubit) adiabatic quantum computer, that was demonstrated on February 13th, 2007 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. (The second demo of the prototype was on February 15th, 2007 at the Telus World of Science in Vancouver, Canada).^[1] D-Wave is a spinoff from the department of Physics and Astronomy at UBC. Its mission is to commercialize superconducting quantum computers. Historically, it operated within a global collaborative network of research scientists. The company is backed by private investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Harris & Harris.

1 Establishment
2 Orion Demonstrations
3 Orion Description
4 See also
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Establishment

D-Wave was founded by Haig Farris (chair of board), Geordie Rose (CTO and former CEO), Bob Wiens (former CFO), and Alexandre Zagoskin (former VP Research and Chief Scientist). Farris taught an entrepreneurship course at the University of British Columbia where Rose obtained his Ph.D. and Zagoskin was a postdoctoral fellow. The company name is due to the fact that their first qubit designs involved d-wave superconductors.

D-Wave operated as a spinoff from UBC, while maintaining ties with the department of Physics and Astronomy. It funded academic research in quantum computing, thus building a collaborative network of research scientists. The company partnered with several universities and institutions, including UBC, IPHT Jena, Université de Sherbrooke, University of Toronto, University of Twente, Chalmers University of Technology, and University of Erlangen. These researchers worked with D-Wave scientists and engineers. Most of D-Wave's peer-reviewed technical publications come from this period. Some publications have D-Wave employees as authors, while others include employees of their partners as well or only. As of 2005, these partnerships and resulting technical papers were no longer listed on D-Wave’s website. ^[2] ^[3] As of 2007, a full text search for "D-Wave Systems Inc." in the physics subject area of the arXiv.org preprint server returned 72 hits.^[4]

D-Wave operated from various locations in Vancouver and laboratory spaces at UBC until it moved to its current location in the neighboring suburb of Burnaby.

[edit] Orion Demonstrations

D-wave showed three examples of Orion in operation, marking the first public demonstration of a quantum computer and associated service. The first, an example of pattern matching, showed search for a similar compound to a known drug within a database of molecules. The next computed a seating arrangement for an event subject to compatibilities and incompatibilities between guests. The last involved solving a Sudoku puzzle.

The demonstrations accessed the quantum computer remotely, because the device is too delicate to transport. D-Wave Systems had not released the full details of Orion to the scientific community, and as such many physicists knowledgeable about quantum computing have expressed skepticism. "My gut instinct is that I doubt there is a major 'free lunch' here," said noted physicist Andrew Steane, noting that the problem of adiabatics is a major technical hurdle that has not yet been feasibly solved even in theory.^[5] "This is somewhat like claims of cold fusion," Steane added.^[6] In an interview in Wired, David Deutsch, an early champion of quantum computing, said "The idea will either be valid, or not. … I think that the normal processes of scientific criticism, peer review and just general discussion in the scientific community is going to test this idea -- provided enough information is given of what this idea is. That will be quite independent of what kind of access they provide to the public. However, I think the idea of providing an interface such as you describe is a very good one. I think it's a wonderful idea. ..." ^[7] D-Wave themselves admit that they "are not sure" if the device is actually doing quantum computations, instead stating that it simply may be using quantum mechanics to do essentially classical computation.

[edit] Orion Description

These processors demonstrated are part of D-Wave Systems' "Orion quantum computing system", which is a hardware accelerator designed to solve a particular NP-complete problems related the two dimensional Ising model in a magnetic field.^[1] It is a 16-qubit superconducting adiabatic quantum computer processor.^[8]

According to the company, a conventional front end running an application that requires the solution of an NP-complete problem, such as pattern matching, passes the problem to the Orion system.

However, the company does not make the claim that its systems can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time.

According to Dr. Geordie Rose, Founder and Chief Technology Officer of D-Wave, NP-complete problems "are probably not exactly solvable, no matter how big, fast or advanced computers get" so the adiabatic quantum computer used by the Orion system is intended to quickly compute an approximate solution. ^[9]