IBM announces 50-fold quantum speed improvement

Up until now, the users were computational scientists exploring how these quantum circuits can be used for specific scientific domains, Mittal says. That’s starting to change. “At the 5,000-gate operations scale, we are also starting to see the emergence of quantum working in line with classical computing to calculate the properties of systems that are relevant to chemistry,” he says.

Today, researchers, scientists, and quantum developers are beginning to leverage quantum computing to help solve complex problems. For example, Cleveland Clinic is exploring this technology to simulate molecular bonds, which is key to solving pharmaceutical problems.

“We are pushing through traditional scientific boundaries using cutting-edge technology such as Qiskit to advance research and find new treatments for patients around the globe,” says Lara Jehi, chief research information officer at Cleveland Clinic, in a statement. “

“The work with Cleveland Clinic is already beginning to yield results,” says Mittal. The secret sauce, he says, is that the Cleveland Clinic combined classical and quantum computing in one workflow, which produced results not possible with quantum alone.

“Enterprises can use our utility-scale systems now,” he says. “However, our ultimate goal is that developers now use these existing quantum computers to search for heuristic quantum advantages, much like the early days of GPUs being employed to find speedups in high-performance computing.”

But quantum advantage – where quantum computers are cheaper, faster, or more accurate than traditional computers – is still a few years away, he says.