Daily Archives: September 4, 2021

Companies including Anthem, Daimler-Benz, BP and ExxonMobil, have big plans to deploy IBM quantum computers this decade.

Image: PhonlamaiPhoto, Getty Images/iStockphoto

Quantum computers have been receiving a lot of attention because of their potential to solve computationally difficult problems that classical computers cannot. Among those problems are the abilities to help companies reduce their carbon footprint and protect the world from the next pandemic.

SEE: The CIO's guide to quantum computing (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Since announcing the IBM Quantum Network in 2017 with 12 initial organizations, today IBM said its commercial quantum computing program has grown to more than 150 Fortune 500 companies, academic institutions, startups and national research labs. Some 360,000 users have run nearly a trillion circuits, according to the company.

Last spring, IBM rolled out Qiskit Runtime, and the ability to speed up quantum programs on the cloud by 120x, as well as IBM's to deliver a 1,000+ qubit system by 2023.

In addition to increasing speed, Qiskit Runtime changes how IBM is able to offer quantum computing to clients and make it more widely available, the company said.

"Before we got to Runtime, clients were doing research using simulators," and now they can investigate applications for finance, machine learning and chemistry using real hardware, said Jay Gambetta, IBM fellow and vice president of quantum computing.

"To me, this is fundamentally important because a simulator can never mimic quantum computing, so you need to do your research and development on the hardware and that's what's getting enabled," Gambetta said. "I see this year as when this fully comes out of beta and will be the new way of using quantum" to ask questions such as whether quantum will scale in the way clients can use apps."

In the meantime, customers are incorporating quantum into their plans for the future. At healthcare provider Anthem, quantum computing is "an integral part of our digital platform for health," and is being used for "computationally intense and expensive tasks such as identifying anomalies, where there's tons of data and interactions," said John Utz, staff vice president of digital product management.

Quantum computers are better at that than classical computers, Utz said. Anthem is running different models on IBM's quantum cloud. Right now, company officials are building a roadmap around how Anthem wants to deliver its platform using quantum technology, so "I can't say quantum is ready for primetime yet," Utz said. "The plan is to get there over the next year or so and have something working in production."

SEE: Expert: Now is the time to prepare for the quantum computing revolution(TechRepublic)

A good place to start with anomaly detection is in finding fraud, he said. "Classical computers will tap out at some point and can't get to the same place as quantum computers."

Other use cases are around longitudinal population health modeling, meaning that as Anthem looks at providing more of a digital platform for health, one of the challenges is that there is "almost an infinite number of relationships," he said. This includes different health conditions, providers patients see, outcomes and figuring out where there are outliers, he said.

"There's only so much a classical system can do there, so we're looking for more opportunities to improve healthcare for our members and the population at large," and the ability to proactively predict risk, Utz said. Quantum computers are better at driving outcomes from the models Anthem is building, he said.

At BP, the ability "to model and predict the physical world has always been constrained by available compute power," said Morag Watson, chief digital innovation officer. As the energy company focuses on sustainability and net-zero carbon energy, the need for even higher performance computing will increase, she said.

Further, "tackling some of the world's toughest problems, including climate change, will require orders of magnitude increases of compute power over today's conventional capabilities," Watson said. BP sees quantum computing as critical to enabling it to pursue its ambition to become a net-zero company by 2050 or sooner and to help the world get to net zero, Watson said.

Specifically, BP is working on proofs of concept using quantum systems in several fields, including chemistry, materials science, optimization, machine learning and partial differential equations, she said. Echoing Anthem's Utz, Watson added, "These are problems that can't be solved on classical computers today."

Daimler AG, the parent company of Mercedes-Benz, is studying how to develop energy-dense batteries such as the lithium-sulfur battery. But going from the drawing board to a commercially viable Li-S battery is "essentially a mammoth chemistry experiment," the company said.

Engineers are testing quantum systems to distill some very abstract physics theory into a new kind of computing power that can handle what IBM calls "once-insoluble complexity." Using quantum bits known as qubits, the performance doubles, giving a substantial boost to the ability to run algorithms to speed the simulation process and test the feasibility of the battery, the company said.

Energy challenges are expected to increase as the global population grows from 7.5 billion today to a projected 9.2 billion by 2040, according to ExxonMobil. This has created what the company refers to as the "dual challenge" of providing reliable and affordable energy to a rising population while also reducing environmental impacts and the risks of climate change.

One way to tackle that challenge in the near term is to use natural gas, which emits up to 60% less greenhouse gases than coal, according to Dr. Vijay Swarup, vice president of research and development at ExxonMobil, in a statement. This creates issues with production and transportation, he said.

SEE: Startup claims new "quantum analog computer" solved the traveling salesman problem for 128 cities(TechRepublic)

It requires efficient liquified natural gas shipping, but finding optimal routes for a fleet of LNG ships to transport critical fuel supplies is a "mind-bendingly complex optimization problem." It involves accounting for each ship's position every day of the year along with the LNG requirements of each delivery site.

This type of problem cannot be solved exactly with classical computing, IBM said. So ExxonMobil, in tandem with IBM Research, is using a combination of classical and quantum computers to address the complexity. Teams are modeling maritime inventory routing on quantum devices, analyzing the strengths and tradeoffs of different strategies for vehicle and inventory routing, and laying the foundation for constructing practical solutions for their operations, IBM said.

Swarup said ExxonMobil's goal is to increase its ability to tackle more complex optimizations and previously insoluble routing problems as IBM's quantum hardware scales from small prototype systems to larger devices.

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IBM quantum computing: From healthcare to automotive to energy, real use cases are in play - TechRepublic

JOHANNESBURG, Sept. 1, 2021 Isaac Nape, an emerging South African talent in the study of quantum optics, is part of a crack team of Wits physicists who led an international study that revealed the hidden structures of quantum entangled states. The study was published in the renowned scientific journal, Nature Communications, on Aug. 27, 2021.

Nape is pursuing his Ph.D. at Wits University and focuses on harnessing structuredpatterns of lightfor high dimensional information encoding and decoding for use inquantum communication.

Earlier this year he scooped up two awards at the South African Institute of Physics (SAIP) conference to add to his growing collection of accolades in the field of optics and photonics. He won the award for Best Ph.D. oral presentation in applied physics, and jointly won the award for Best Ph.D. oral presentation in photonics.

In May, he was also awarded the prestigious 2021 Optics and Photonics Education Scholarship from the SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics, for his potential contributions to the field of optics, photonics or related field.

Faster and More Secure Computing

Now Nape and his colleagues at Wits, together with collaborators from Scotland and Taiwan offer a new and fast tool for quantum computing and communication. Quantum states that are entangled in many dimensions are key to our emerging quantum technologies, where more dimensions mean a higher quantum bandwidth (faster) and better resilience to noise (security), crucial for both fast and secure communication and speed up in error-freequantum computing.

What we have done here is to invent a new approach to probing these high-dimensional quantum states, reducing the measurement time from decades to minutes, Nape explains.

Nape worked with Distinguished Professor Andrew Forbes, lead investigator on this study and Director of the Structured Light Laboratory in the School of Physics at Wits, as well as postdoctoral fellow Dr. Valeria Rodriguez-Fajardo, visiting Taiwanese researcher Dr. Hasiao-Chih Huang, and Dr. Jonathan Leach and Dr. Feng Zhu from Heriot-Watt University in Scotland.

Are You Quantum or Not?

In their paper titled Measuring dimensionality and purity of high-dimensional entangled states, the team outlined a new approach to quantum measurement, testing it on a 100 dimensional quantum entangled state.

With traditional approaches, the time of measurement increases unfavorably with dimension, so that to unravel a 100-dimensional state by a full quantum state tomography would take decades. Instead, the team showed that the salient information of the quantum systemthe number of dimensions entangled and their level of puritycould be deduced in just minutes. The new approach requires only simple projections that could easily be done in most laboratories with conventional tools. Using light as an example, the team using an all-digital approach to perform the measurements.

The problem, explains Nape, is that while high-dimensional states are easily made, particularly with entangled particles of light (photons), they are not easy to measurethe existing toolbox for measuring and controlling them is almost empty.

You can think of a high-dimensional quantum state like faces of a dice. A conventional dice has six faces, numbered one through six, for a six-dimensional alphabet that can be used for computing or for transferring information in communication. To make high-dimensional dice means creating dice with many more faces: 100 dimensions equals 100 facesa rather complicated polygon.

In our everyday world, it would be easy to count the faces to know what sort of resource we had available to us, but not so in the quantum world. In the quantum world, you can never see the whole die, so counting the faces is very difficult. The way we get around this is to do a tomography, as they do in the medical world, building up a picture from many, many slices of the object, explains Nape.

But the information in quantum objects can be enormous, so the time for this process is prohibitive. A faster approach is a Bell measurement, a famous test to tell if what you have in front of you is entangled, like asking it are you quantum or not? But while this confirms quantum correlations of the dice, it doesnt say much about the number of faces it has.

Chance Discovery

Our work circumvented the problem by a chance discovery, that there is a set of measurements that is not a tomography and not a Bell measurement, but that holds important information of both, says Nape. In technical parlance, we blended these two measurement approaches to do multiple projections that look like a tomography but measuring the visibilities of the outcome, as if they were Bell measurements. This revealed the hidden information that could be extracted from the strength of the quantum correlations across many dimensions.

First and Fast

The combination of speed from the Bell-like approach and information from the tomography-like approach meant that key quantum parameters such as dimensionality and the purity of the quantum state could be determined quickly and quantitatively, the first approach to do so.

We are not suggesting that our approach replace other techniques, says Forbes. Rather, we see it as a fast probe to reveal what you are dealing with, and then use this information to make an informed decision on what to do next. A case of horses-for-courses.

For example, the team see their approach as changing the game in real-world quantum communication links, where a fast measurement of how noisy thatquantum statehas become and what this has done to the useful dimensions is crucial.

To read the study in Nature Communications, visit: DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-25447-0.

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Fast Tool Developed for Quantum Computing and Communication - HPCwire

Quantum technologies refer to engineering systems that use the quantum properties of photons, electrons, atoms or molecules. For example, Radio China reports that lasers, magnetic resonance imaging and the global stabilization system are closely linked to quantum technology.

Zhao Fuan, a recent graduate of the Chinese University of Science and Technology and a doctoral candidate in optical engineering, left a well-paying job with an annual salary of 600,000 yuan ($ 92,300) and decided to start his own business in quantum computing. . The foundation of quantum computing technology. For example, when a new object is discovered, we can assess whether the equipment is working properly by detecting any change in the electromagnetic field around it, he explains.

Currently, common methods for checking the quality of electrical equipment, such as temperature measurement and ultraviolet radiation, are good for detecting large thermal defects, but are not as effective for small ones or for predicting potential problems that may develop rapidly.

According to Zhao Bowen, in terms of quantum technology, China already has its advantages over relatively good countries, but lags behind in some areas, such as sensors used for facial recognition.

Another young expert who has linked his career with quantum technology is Ha Yu from Sichuan Province. Before completing his doctorate, he launched a new product in the field of quantum sensors, which has great potential in detecting microscopic structures such as cellular and protein molecules. In 2016, he founded CIQTEK, which specializes in quantum computing, which is gaining desirable interest from investors. We have investors like iFlytek and Hillhouse Capital behind us, and the government has given us some support, he said.

Zhao Bowen and Ha Yu are a growing army of experts in quantum physics, quantum computing and related industries in China. According to statistics, in the first half of this year, more than 4,000 companies related to quantum technology were created, an increase of 652% on an annual basis.

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Leading Chinese researchers are looking at the coming quantum revolution - The Press Stories

AMD AMD has taken the world of advanced chip technology by storm, with revolutionary CEO Lisa Su transforming this discount semiconductor enterprise into a leading-edge innovator. Since Lisa Su took the helm in 2014, AMD shares have skyrocketed an incomprehensible 3,200% (a $1000 investment would have yielded you $32,000 in returns).

The pandemic's digitalizing economic impact pulled forward an enormous amount of demand for AMD's innovation-driven chips, demand that will only grow from here. This semiconductor powerhouse has produced record top and bottom-line results for the past 4 consecutive quarters, blowing past analysts' estimates each time. AMD achieved record profit margins, and management raised its guidance for the remainder of the 2021. Now, analysts across the board are driving up their EPS estimates propelling AMD into a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy).

The last time AMD reached a Zacks Rank #1, it shot up 67.5% in just 1.5 months (July 17th to September 1st, 2020). AMD's August consolidation looks to presenting us with an excellent entry point as demand for next-generation chip technology continues to soar, providing AMD with pricing power and an incentive to push the boundaries of innovation.

AMD's Sights Set To The Future

AMD is already pushing the limits of possibilities with its latest patent filing, which unveiled a quantum-computing processor that would utilize teleportation. This patent addresses the stability and scalability issues that current quantum-computing frameworks have been struggling with and could revolutionize the world of computing if achieved. The technology may still be years away from commercial viability, but this patent filing illustrates AMD's focus on the 4th Industrial Revolution.

Quantum computing is a nascent space, but there is an enormous amount of capital flowing into its development due to the astronomical competitive advantage it would provide. In 2019, Google's GOOGL quantum-computer Sycamore proved its ability to solve a complex mathematical equation 158 million times faster than the world's fastest binary supercomputer (IBM's Summit). If AMD could attain a competitive edge in the quantum-computing space, the profit potential would be boundless.

Story continues

As for near-term goals, AMD is expected to release its 5nm 'Zen 4' high-performance CPU in the second quarter of 2022, which will sustain this chip designer's high-performance leadership in the space. This next-generation computer processor will be up to 40% faster than the currently available 'Zen 3,' and will almost certainly be the go-to CPU for data centers (EPYC) and consumer desktops & mobile processors (RYZEN) alike, as Intel lags the innovative curve.

AMD Takeover

While Intel INTC has seemingly fallen asleep at the wheel with its once leading CPUs, AMD was provided with the rare opportunity to jump in the driver's seat of a market that had been monopolized for half a century. Intel's inability to match Taiwan Semi's TSM third party manufacturing abilities (AMD's preferred fabricator) with its one in-house operations combined with other systemic supply chain issues has propelled AMD at least 3 years ahead of it (on a generous scale).

Following a strongly worded letter from an activist investor group, Intel decided enough was enough and brought Pat Gelsinger on as the new CEO in February of this year. The company will be hard-pressed in this game of innovative catch-up to maintain its long-standing corporate relationships with AMD's CPU technology, showing clear performance advantages.

According to PassMark, AMD now controls 40% of the total CPU space, while Intel sits at 60%. AMD has more than doubled its market share in the past 5 years and will progressively control more in the coming years as Intel attempts to restore its leadership. TSMC's accelerating capabilities will be the backbone to AMD's future success, and I don't see Intel's in-house manufacturing catching up to TSMC anytime soon.

AMD is also a leader in the graphic processing unit (GPU) duopoly with NVIDIA NVDA. However, they have not been as successful in competing with this revolutionary chip maker, who has been taking a growing portion of market share in this space. Still, its GPU segment provides AMD with a further diversified product portfolio that provides a hedge for the volatile chip business cycles.

The Financials

AMD has demonstrated accelerating revenue growth with its sales swelling by 99% in this past quarter, which flowed down to margin expanded profits that drove up 350% from a year prior. This chip innovator is expected to see double-digit annualized growth on both its top and bottom-line for years to come.

AMD's balance sheet is a fortress, with more liquid capital than total liabilities, meaning the risk of default is effectively 0, especially when factoring in its exponentially appreciating quarterly cash-flows.

AMD is a seemingly expensive stock with a forward P/E of 38.4x, far above the semiconductor industry average of 22x. However, when you factor growth into this valuation multiple (PEG), the company is trading at a discount to both the chip sector and its own 3-year average.

Final Thoughts

My bet in AMD is a bet on Lisa Su. She has been AMD's innovation catalyzer and invigorated this discount chipmaker into a high-performance, high-growth market leader. I am confident that she will continue to drive this technological backbone above and beyond expectations.

17 out of 25 analysts call AMD a buy today (0 sell ratings), with recent price targets being raised as high as $150 a share (over 35% upside from here). The 4th Industrial Revolution is upon us, and it's time to start investing in it.

Want the latest recommendations from Zacks Investment Research? Today, you can download 7 Best Stocks for the Next 30 Days. Click to get this free reportIntel Corporation (INTC) : Free Stock Analysis ReportAdvanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD) : Free Stock Analysis ReportNVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) : Free Stock Analysis ReportTaiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd. (TSM) : Free Stock Analysis ReportAlphabet Inc. (GOOGL) : Free Stock Analysis ReportTo read this article on Zacks.com click here.Zacks Investment Research

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Bull Of The Day: AMD (AMD) - Yahoo Finance

It May Be Too Early to Prepare Your Data Center for Quantum Computing:Before some fundamental questions are answered, it's hard to predict what shape quantum computing will take at scale.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft Share New Security Efforts After White House Summit:The news arrives after tech company leaders met with President Biden to discuss the public-private partnership needed to address security threats.

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Top 10 Data Center Stories of the Month: August 2021 - Data Center Knowledge