Key highlights from IBM Quantum Summit 2023

Global technology company IBM recently held its IBM Quantum Summit 2023 in New York. The event saw several announcements pertaining to quantum-related hardware and software innovation from IBM. 

Here are the main highlights

IBM Quantum Heron

IBM Quantum Heron showcased today, is the first in the series of the company’s utility-scale quantum processor. The company claims that Quantum Heron delivers the highest performance metrics and lowest error rates compared to any of its previous Quantum processors to date. 

Experiments are already running on the new  IBM Quantum Heron 133-qubit processor which is now available to users via the cloud. Other processors in the series will join IBM’s utility-scale fleet of systems over the next year. Heron offers a five-times improvement in best records demonstrated by the preceeding quantum processor called Quantum Eagle.

To be sure, the 127-qubit Quantum Eagle was demonstrated by IBM earlier this year. It will now be utilised as a scientific tool to  explore utility-scale classes of problems in chemistry, physics, and materials beyond brute force classical simulation of quantum mechanics.   

IBM Quantum Development Roadmap

IBM announced the expansion of its Quantum Development Roadmap up top 2033. As part of the newly expanded plan, IBM highlights the improvement in the number of gates in the processors, for instance, Heron is expected to reach 5,000 gates by 2024. To be sure, the number of gates on a processor is indicative of its speed and capability.

Also, as part of the roadmap, the future processors are intended to improve the quality of operations they can run to extend the complexity and workload size they can handle.

IBM Quantum System Two

IBM Quantum System Two was also announced at the summit. It combines scalable cryogenic infrastructure and classical runtime servers with modular qubit control electronics, and is considered the foundation for IBM’s next-generation quantum computing system architecture.

A building block for IBM’s quantum-centric supercomputing, the Quantum System Two combines quantum communication and computation. It is assisted by classical computing resources and has a middleware layer to integrate quantum and classical workflows.

For Quantum software programming

Apart from the hardware announcements, IBM has a plan up its sleeve on the software side. 

IBM has announced that its quantum computing software development kit (SDK) Qiskit 1.0 will be coming in February 2024. This SDK demonstrates ‘marked improvement’  in circuit construction, compilation times, and memory consumption compared to earlier releases. In addition, Qiskit 1.0 outperforms competing compilation frameworks in both runtime and resultant two-qubit gate counts when mapping circuits to quantum hardware, the company said.

Apart from Qiskit 1.0, IBM also announced Qiskit Patterns. Defined as mechanism that will quantum developers to create code, it consists of a collection of tools to simply map classical problems, optimize them to quantum circuits using Qiskit, executing those circuits using Qiskit Runtime, and then postprocess the results. This, along with Quantum Serverless, developers will be able to build, deploy, and execute workflows integrating classical and quantum computation in different environments.

In the same context, IBM is also leveraging generative AI for quantum code programming through watsonx. To be sure, IBM watsonx is the company’s enterprise AI platform. IBM will integrate generative AI available through watsonx to help automate the development of quantum code for Qiskit. This will be achieved through the finetuning of the IBM Granite model series.