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QUANTUM COMPUTING
Quantum leaps needed for
new computing approach
Led by Lockheed Martin and IBM, researchers are pushing quantum computing prototypes for military and other applications
BY GEORGE LEOPOLD
Quantum computing research- ers and practitioners, includ- ing the chief scientist at the nation’s largest military contractor, say the technology holds great promise for cybersecurity and cryptography — and in emerging areas such as the software testing required for multibillion-dollar weapons.
As incremental performance gains from traditional digital computing ar- chitectures prove harder to achieve, researchers are turning to quantum computers that encode information as quantum bits, or qubits, rather than bi- nary zeros and ones.
Major performance gains have so far proved elusive, but researchers recent- ly said the quantum technology’s ben- efits continue to grow as prototypes are built and a technology ecosystem emerges.
“We’re starting to reach the tipping point for investing in this technology,” Landon Downs, co-founder of quantum software startup 1QBit, said during a panel discussion hosted by the Informa- tion Technology and Innovation Foun- dation in December 2016.
Among the largest investors in quan- tum computing is Lockheed Martin, whose quantum science program goes back two decades. The company, one of the first to invest in the technology, purchased the first D-Wave Systems
quantum computer in 2010. Ned Al- len, Lockheed Martin’s chief scientist, said the company invested about $15 million to “mess with” the D-Wave One machine, eventually using its verifica- tion and validation (V&V) program to test mission-critical software.
Software accounts for about half the cost of control systems on advanced weapons such as the F-35 fighter jet, Allen said. Therefore, the D-Wave One machine was integrated into Lockheed Martin’s engineering processes as a co- processor with the goal of reducing the skyrocketing cost of spotting errors in software that must work flawlessly.
The stakes for weapons testing are enormous, he added, and V&V costs can run as high as $50 million a day when flight simulations are being run to debug software. The company turned to quantum computing as a way to manage those software-testing costs.
A sample problem involved search- ing for an error in a 30-year-old chunk of software code for the F-16 fighter. It took the company’s top engineers sev- eral months to pinpoint the error; the D-Wave machine found it in six weeks.
“Quantum computers are not going to be used in isolation,” Allen said, but instead would be applied to the parts of the software validation problem they are best suited for. Other potential ap- plications include analytics and quan-
tum imaging for sonar and radar sys- tems, he added.
Lockheed Martin is also using quan- tum computing to develop battery tech- nology that would store entropy rather than energy, an approach Allen said could yield energy densities that are orders of magnitude higher than con- ventional batteries.
Ultimately, he said, hybrid comput- ing platforms will emerge to make the most of quantum coprocessors.
Meanwhile, the quantum-computing ecosystem continues to expand and in- cludes a research platform released by IBM in May 2016 that has already at- tracted about 33,000 users. The cloud- based system represents the beginning of a quantum community, said Robert Wisnieff, a quantum researcher at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center.
Meanwhile, quantum software start- ups like 1QBit are seeking to optimize machine language and existing pro- gramming languages to run on emerg- ing quantum hardware. “The first ap- plications [for quantum computing] are being developed today,” Downs said.
Another hurdle is having quantum platforms to work with, said Tim Polk, assistant director for cybersecurity in the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy. IBM’s cloud- based quantum system helped address that gap. “We need to be able to walk
44 GCN MARCH/APRIL 2017 • GCN.COM