The Decade of Quantum Computing Is Upon Us, IBM Executive Says
March 03 2021 - 3:39PM
Dow Jones News
By Jared Council
As more uses for quantum computing appear, chief information
officers need to help their companies see the emerging technology's
potential as well as its risks, an International Business Machines
Corp. executive said on Tuesday.
"This is going to be the decade in which quantum really comes of
age," said Dario Gil, senior vice president and director of IBM
Research, at The Wall Street Journal's virtual CIO Network
summit.
Leveraging the properties of quantum physics, quantum computers
have the ability to sort through a vast number of possibilities in
nearly real time and come up with a probable solution. Difficulties
with hardware have held back the adoption of quantum computing, but
that is about to change, Dr. Gil said.
IBM is planning to release new quantum systems this year and
next, but a big shift will come with the system the company plans
to release in 2023, Dr. Gil said. That one for the first time will
allow engineers to mitigate errors through software, as opposed to
only through hardware.
"We've got to get these computers to operate without errors, and
if we can do that we'll realize their full potential," he said. "So
what we envision is in 2023, when we deliver that system, it will
be an inflection point in that the errors of quantum computers will
continue to decrease exponentially through software, as opposed to
just by making the device better."
After that point, he said, quantum computers will start to be
used on a broader scale.
Major corporations are already experimenting with early-stage
quantum technology, among them, Visa Inc., JPMorgan Chase &
Co., Roche Holding AG and Volkswagen AG.
Quantum computers harness the properties of quantum physics,
including superposition and entanglement, to radically speed up
complex calculations intractable to today's computers. Conventional
computers store information as either zeros or ones, but quantum
computers use quantum bits, or qubits, which represent and store
information as both zeros and ones simultaneously.
While a commercial-grade quantum computer hasn't been built yet,
startups and tech giants including IBM, Alphabet Inc.'s Google and
Microsoft Corp. are racing to commercialize the technology.
Dr. Gil said quantum computers will be able to speed up
research-and-development discoveries because the machines will
excel at modeling physics, chemistry and materials science. This
could lead to developing more energy-efficient batteries in the
auto sector, he said, or better carbon-capture membranes to fight
climate change.
"That's my vision: Bring the power of computing to compress the
time to discovery of what we need," he said.
Quantum computers are also poised to benefit from artificial
intelligence algorithms, partly because of their ability to solve
complex mathematical problems.
CIOs looking to benefit from quantum computing can start by
experimenting with community platforms such as the open-source
Qiskit framework, which provides tools for developers to create and
run quantum programs on real quantum hardware or simulators, he
said.
Companies should form small working groups that can start to
identify problems that quantum computing may be able to help solve,
he said.
"Value today means, do you have a small team that knows what's
going on in quantum and start mapping to problems that are relevant
to your business?"
But companies should also brace themselves for quantum
computing's implications for cybersecurity: The machines will be
able to break encryption locks that ordinary computers have trouble
cracking, Dr. Gil said. Companies should consider migrating
important business systems to so-called "quantum-safe" encryption
protocols, he said.
"It's very important that all of you develop crypto-agility, and
you develop a migration path and a quantum-safe approach to do
encryption and security," he said. "Because if you don't, you're
going to leave your institutions vulnerable to these kinds of
attacks in the future."
Write to Jared Council at jared.council@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 03, 2021 15:24 ET (20:24 GMT)
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