D-Wave Systems

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D-Wave Systems Inc.
Type Private
Founded 1999
Headquarters Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
Key people Herb Martin, CEO
Geordie Rose, CTO
V. Paul Lee, Chair
Industry Computer hardware
Products (currently none publicly available)
Revenue N/A
Net income N/A
Employees approx. 60
Subsidiaries None
Website www.dwavesys.com

D-Wave Systems, Inc. is a technology company, based in Burnaby, British Columbia. On January 19, 2007, it announced a working prototype of a potentially commercially-viable quantum computer. However, the claim that it is actually a quantum computer is disputed.[1][2]

The prototype is, according to D-Wave, a 16-qubit adiabatic quantum computer, which they 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, BC.)[3] D-Wave is a spinoff from the department of Physics and Astronomy at University of British Columbia. 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. D-Wave demonstrated what they claimed to be a 28-qubit adiabatic quantum computer on November 12, 2007.[4] The chip was fabbed at the Jet Propulsion Lab’s microdevices lab in Pasadena.[5]


Contents

[edit] Establishment

D-Wave was founded by Haig Farris (former 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 UBC, where Rose obtained his Ph.D. and Zagoskin was a postdoctoral fellow. The company name refers to their first qubit designs, which used d-wave superconductors.

D-Wave operated as an offshoot 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 collaborated with several universities and institutions, including UBC, IPHT Jena, Université de Sherbrooke, University of Toronto, University of Twente, Chalmers University of Technology, University of Erlangen, and Jet Propulsion Laboratory. 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.[6][7] As of 2007, a full text search for "D-Wave Systems Inc." in the physics subject area of the arXiv.org preprint server returns 72 hits.[8]

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

[edit] Orion demonstration

On February 13th, 2007, D-Wave demonstrated the Orion system, running three different applications at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. This marked the first public demonstration of, supposedly, a quantum computer and associated service.

The first application, an example of pattern matching, performed a search for a similar compound to a known drug within a database of molecules. The next application computed a seating arrangement for an event subject to compatibilities and incompatibilities between guests. The last involved solving a Sudoku puzzle.

[edit] Orion description

The processors at the heart of D-Wave's "Orion quantum computing system" are hardware accelerators designed to solve a particular NP-complete problem related to the two dimensional Ising model in a magnetic field.[3] It is, according to D-Wave, a 16-qubit superconducting adiabatic quantum computer processor.[9]

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 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.[10]

[edit] Criticism

D-Wave has been heavily criticized by some scientists in the quantum computing field. According to Scott Aaronson, a Computer Science professor at MIT who specializes in the theory of quantum computing, D-Wave's demonstration did not prove anything about the workings of the computer. He claimed a useful quantum computer would require a huge breakthrough in physics, which has not been published or shared with the physics community.[1][2] Dr. Aaronson has maintained or updated his criticisms on his blog.[11]

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b Shtetl-Optimized: The Orion Quantum Computer Anti-Hype FAQ (2007-02-09). Retrieved on 2007-05-17.
  2. ^ a b Shtetl-Optimized: D-Wave Easter Spectacular (2007-04-07). Retrieved on 2007-05-17.
  3. ^ a b Quantum Computing Demo Announcement (2007-01-19). Retrieved on 2007-02-11.
  4. ^ D-Wave Systems: News
  5. ^ A picture of the demo chip « rose.blog
  6. ^ D-Wave Systems at the Way Back Machine (2002-11-23). Retrieved on 2007-02-17.
  7. ^ D-Wave Systems at the Way Back Machine (2005-03-24). Retrieved on 2007-02-17.
  8. ^ Preprints related to D-Wave Systems in ArXiv.org (2007-02-18). Retrieved on 2007-02-18.
  9. ^ Scalable Architecture for Adiabatic Quantum Computing of NP-Hard Problems (PDF) (2002-11-23). Retrieved on 2007-02-11.
  10. ^ Yeah but how fast is it? Part 3. OR some thoughts about adiabatic QC (2006-08-27). Retrieved on 2007-02-11.
  11. ^ Shtetl-Optimized: Thanksgiving Special: D-Wave at MIT (2007-11-22). Retrieved on 2007-12-03.

[edit] External links