UK’s National Quantum Technologies Programme: Seeking to Translate Technical Gains into Commercial Opportunity

The Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) recently announced plans for the development of a 1.5 exaflops system called Frontier to be delivered in 2021. US HPC maker Cray and chip maker AMD are the two key US commercial partners in this effort. Despite numerous press articles centered on the 1.5 exaflops peak performance of Frontier, ORNL's original RFP released in April of 2018 clearly called out the diverse workload requirements that Frontier would have to successfully handle that span the traditional modeling and simulation sector, big data analysis, and AI applications, while demonstrating a 50X improvement in solving key DOE science problems that today run at the 20 petaflops level. To meet those ambitious goals, strong support from DOE's companion $1.7 billion Exascale Computing Project (ECP) will be critical.

IBM's recent announcement of their new Q System One universal quantum computer is yet another milestone in the firm's long-term commitment to transitioning quantum computing (QC) hardware from one-off research status into a capable commercial offering. Although the new Q System One, as announced, does not demonstrate any significant advances in current quantum computing capability, as measured by the number of qubits per system, it does show that IBM can design and manufacture a system that, at the right price, could be attractive to a wide range of users looking to integrate quantum computing into their overall R&D process.