What are companies doing with D-Wave quantum hardware?

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While many companies now provide access to general-purpose quantum computers, they are currently not used to solve real-world problems, as they are hampered by issues with the number and quality of qubits . Most of their users are running research projects or just gaining experience with programming on the systems in hopes that a future computer will be useful.

There are quantum systems based on superconducting material that are in commercial use; it's just that they are not general purpose computers.

D-Wave offers what is called quantum annealing. The hardware is a large collection of related superconducting devices that use quantum effects to achieve the energetic ground states of the system. When properly configured, this end state represents the solution to a mathematical problem. Annealers cannot solve the same full range of mathematical problems as general-purpose quantum computers, such as those made by Google, IBM, and others. But they can be used to solve various optimization problems.

Although systems can suffer from errors, the consequences are relatively minor, as they tend to leave systems with a solution that is mathematically close to an optimal one.

Unlike general-purpose quantum computers, quantum annealers have not been shown mathematically to consistently outperform traditional computers. But unlike general-purpose quantum computers, they have had high bit counts, good connectivity, and reasonable error rates for several years. And a number of companies are now using them to solve real-world problems.

Drug searches

One of the companies relying on D-Wave's hardware is POLARISqb, which works in drug discovery, identifying potential drug molecules in software for companies to test in systems. biological. His general approach is widely used in the pharmaceutical industry: identify a disease caused by the inappropriate activity of a protein, then find a molecule that alters the function of the protein in such a way as to relieve the disease.

If you know the three-dimensional structure of the protein and which parts of the protein are necessary for its functions, you can use computer modeling to see how well drug molecules cling to that part. This kind of modeling is computationally expensive, but it's still cheaper than synthesizing the molecule and testing it on cells. This is also part of the POLARISqb process, but comes after the use of quantum annealing, which is used to identify test molecules with detailed modeling.

“We design a large virtual chemical space and we use a quantum computer to explore this chemical space to find the best molecules,” POLARISqb founder Shahar Keinan told Ars. The concept of "best" here goes far beyond molecules that simply attach to a protein well.

"We're not just looking for molecules that have one property; we're looking for molecules that will have a whole profile of properties that will give us what we're looking for," Keinan said. "The molecule cannot be too big or too small; the molecule must be sufficiently soluble, but not too soluble. The molecule must have certain properties, such as a number of hydrogen bond donors and acceptors." It also needs to be something that can be synthesized relatively easily.

A computer model of a potential drug in the site active of a protein. Polarisqb

Given all these constraints, there probably won't be a single molecule that fulfills them all; instead, the search will obtain one or more populations of related molecules that are relatively well suited for most applications. Identifying these potential drugs from a sea of ​​molecules is an optimization problem, which becomes more and more computationally intense as you enlarge the size of the sea. And the optimization problems are precisely the kinds of things that D-Wave's computers are designed to handle.

POLARISqb has started working with Fujitsu, which offers custom hardware capable of simulating quantum annealing using traditional silicon chips. B...