International Business Machines (IBM) has been consistently pushing the envelope of quantum computing. From prototyping the world"s first quantum computing-safe drive to making public its plans to roll out a series of quantum-safe cryptography services for IBM Cloud beginning 2020, or unveiling a host of new tools built for making quantum computing accessible, the firm has been actively making announcements in the field over the past weeks.
Today, the tech giant went public with its plans to make available a 53-qubit quantum computer to partners of the IBM Q research program together with the opening of the IBM Quantum Computation Center in New York State.
According to the company, the new 53-qubit quantum computer will be the largest machine of its kind across the industry to be made available for external access, and will be ready sometime in the middle of next month. Moreover, the new system will be able to run more complex entanglement and connectivity experiments by virtue of the large lattice inside it. The Director of IBM Research, Dario Gil, remarked on the feat:
"In order to empower an emerging quantum community of educators, researchers, and software developers that share a passion for revolutionizing computing, we have built multiple generations of quantum processor platforms that we integrate into high-availability quantum systems. We iterate and improve the performance of our systems multiple times per year and this new 53-qubit system now incorporates the next family of processors on our roadmap."
The new data center will house five 20-qubit systems, one 14-qubit system, and four 5-qubit systems. Five of these boast a Quantum Volume of 16, which is a comprehensive metric for measuring the performance of a quantum computer, signaling an impressive performance milestone for the machines. Furthermore, with the addition of the 53-qubit system and a few others, the number of quantum computers in IBM"s fleet will increase to 14 within a month. IBM also promised that these systems will enable research to be carried out at an availability rate of 95%.