Quantinuum first to be invited to join NVIDIA quantum research project
Quantinuum has become a founding collaborator on breakthroughs at the NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Research Center, where operations are expected to begin later this year.
The Cambridge-based company will work with NVIDIA – the world’s largest chip maker by revenue and by market capitalisation – to develop quantum solutions and applications that help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.
The Boston-based Research Center will accomplish this by using NVIDIA CUDA-Q platform alongside a world-leading NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 supercomputer with Quantinuum’s System H2, which achieves 2,097,152 Quantum Volume – orders of magnitude greater than the next best available.
Quantinuum was formed in 2021, the result of a merger between Honeywell Quantum Solutions (HQS) and Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC), with Honeywell holding a majority stake.
The company’s quantum systems deliver the highest performance across all industry benchmarks. Quantinuum has more than 550 employees, including 370 scientists and engineers, across the US, Germany, and Japan, as well as the UK centre at Terrington House on Hills Road.
Quantinuum’s quantum computing architecture delivers the fastest time-to-solution available and is positioned to extend this leadership with its next-generation systems. It expects to launch the industry’s first 100-logical-qubit system, featuring best-in-class error rates, in 2027. The company is also on track to deliver commercially scalable quantum computers with hundreds of logical qubits by the end of the decade.
This progress builds upon a series of recent technology breakthroughs, including Quantinuum’s creation of the most reliable and highest-quality logical qubits, as well as solving the key scalability challenge associated with ion-trap quantum computers – culminating in a commercial system with greater than 99.9 per cent two-qubit gate fidelity.
In 2022, Quantinuum became the first company to bring CUDA-Q to its Quantum systems, establishing a pioneering collaboration that continues to advance the platform today in multiple areas including application development and Quantum Error Correction (QEC).
CUDA-Q, which NVIDIA launched in 2022, is an open-source quantum development platform developed by NVIDIA for general computing on graphical processing units (GPUs).
With CUDA, developers are able to dramatically speed up computing applications by harnessing the power of GPUs. CUDA isn’t a quantum computer itself, rather it enables researchers to develop and simulate quantum algorithms on GPUs and other hardware, including quantum processors, without requiring quantum hardware for its core functionality.
“Progress toward useful quantum computing hinges on new discoveries,” said Tim Costa, senior director of CAE, Quantum, and CUDA-X at NVIDIA. “The NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Research Center will fast-track the development of useful quantum devices, being the epicenter for breakthroughs made with partners like Quantinuum.”
Meanwhile, Quantinuum’s groundbreaking Gen QAI system, announced last month, enables data generated by its quantum systems to be harnessed to train AI systems, significantly enhancing the fidelity of AI models, and allowing them to tackle challenges previously deemed unsolvable.
Through this achievement, Quantinuum is setting a new standard for AI training and problem-solving across various industries.
“By combining NVIDIA’s AI hardware and software solutions with leading and differentiated solutions from Quantinuum, we’re unlocking unprecedented solutions and accelerating generative quantum AI’s adoption across diverse markets,” said Dr Rajeeb Hazra, president and CEO of Quantinuum.
