Overview of Quantum Technology Landscape: D-Wave Systems

Despite the incredible power of today’s supercomputers, there are many complex computing problems that can’t be addressed by conventional systems. Our need to better understand everything, from the universe to our own DNA, leads us to seek new approaches to answer the most difficult questions.

While we are only at the beginning of this journey, quantum computing has the potential to help solve some of the most complex technical, scientific, national defense, and commercial problems that organizations face. We expect that quantum computing will lead to breakthroughs in science, engineering, modeling and simulation, healthcare, financial analysis, optimization, logistics, and national defense applications.

Founded in 1999, D-Wave Systems is the world's first quantum computing company and the leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems and software. Our mission is to unlock the power of quantum computing to solve the world's most challenging problems. Our systems are being used by world-class organizations and institutions including Lockheed Martin, Google, NASA, USC, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. D-Wave has been granted over 140 U.S. patents and has published over 90 peer-reviewed papers in leading scientific journals.

D-Wave's offices are in Vancouver, British Columbia; Palo Alto, California; and Hanover, Maryland. D-Wave is a privately held company.

For the first 5 years the company worked to gather intellectual property and ideas on how quantum computing might be accomplished. Unlike academic research projects, the focus was on how quantum computers could be designed, manufactured, and scaled. Key insights about how such a system could be built led to the decision to utilize and advance superconducting technology as the basis of the quantum computer.

By 2004 it had become apparent that creating good ideas about quantum computing and looking externally for a research team to use this knowledge to build such a machine wouldn't work. So we decided to do it ourselves. We built our own fabrication facility—a superconducting electronics foundry—to produce the quantum processing units (QPUs) that harness quantum resources that are not available classically for computation. We assembled a team of scientists and engineers to design, fabricate, and test the processors and quantum computing systems in our own in-house labs.

In 2010 we released our first commercial system, the D-Wave One™ quantum computer. We have doubled the number of qubits in successive generations, shipping the 512-qubit D-Wave Two™ system in 2013 and the 1000+ qubit D-Wave 2X™ system in 2015. In 2017 we released the D-Wave 2000Q™ system with 2000 qubits and advanced control features.

With the quantum computer in operation, there is a lot more to be done. We are developing different layers of software and fostering a developer ecosystem to make the systems easier to use and more accessible to users. We are also focusing on putting the quantum computers to work solving industry-scale classification, machine learning, and optimization problems with our customers and collaborators. These complex problems exist across many domains such as:

·         Optimization 

·         Machine learning 

·         Sampling / Monte Carlo 

·         Pattern recognition and anomaly detection 

·         Cyber security 

·         Image analysis 

·         Financial analysis 

·         Software / hardware verification and validation 

·         Bioinformatics / cancer research