D-Wave Systems, Inc. is a quantum computing company, headquartered in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. The company is renowned for developing the world's first commercial quantum annealer, a type of quantum computer.
History
- Foundation: D-Wave Systems was founded in 1999 by Geordie Rose, Bob Wiersema, and Alexandre Kryzhaniwsky. Their vision was to harness quantum mechanics for practical computation.
- Early Development: In the early 2000s, D-Wave began exploring quantum annealing, a form of quantum computation different from the gate-model quantum computing pursued by many other organizations.
- First Commercial Product: In 2011, D-Wave announced the release of the D-Wave One, which was the first quantum annealer available commercially. This system had a 128-qubit processor.
- Subsequent Releases:
- Advances in Technology: Over the years, D-Wave has continuously worked on improving the coherence time, connectivity, and programming tools for their quantum annealers.
Quantum Annealing
D-Wave's quantum computers utilize quantum annealing, a process designed to find the global minimum of a given objective function over a large search space. Unlike universal quantum computers, which use gate operations, quantum annealing involves evolving a system from an initial state to a final state that represents the solution to an optimization problem.
Controversies and Scientific Debate
There has been significant debate within the scientific community regarding whether D-Wave's machines achieve quantum speedup or true quantum computation. Some studies suggest that their systems provide quantum advantages for specific types of problems, while others argue that the performance gains are due to classical effects or that the speedup isn't significant over classical algorithms for general-purpose computing.
Applications and Partnerships
D-Wave has partnered with various organizations, including:
- Google for quantum annealing research.
- Lockheed Martin for solving complex optimization problems.
- NASA and USRA (Universities Space Research Association) to apply quantum computing to space exploration challenges.
External Links
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