IBM unveils Heron quantum processor and new modular quantum computer

Quantum computing excels at solving large, data-heavy problems, and future applications are expected to significantly advance areas such as AI and machine-learning in industries including automotive, finance, and healthcare. But among the bigger challenges quantum developers face are the noisiness of today’s quantum systems and the errors they generate.

“Standard classical error correction only needs to correct bit flip errors, where bits accidentally switch from 0 to 1 or vice versa. Quantum computers must correct more kinds of errors, like phase errors which can corrupt the extra quantum information that qubits carry,” IBM researchers stated.

IBM Heron brings a five-fold improvement over the previous best records set by IBM Eagle, IBM stated.

To that end, IBM has been developing Qiskit, an open-source quantum computing software framework that includes a wide range of tools and libraries for all aspects of quantum computing, from error-correction utilities and circuit definitions to quantum simulation capabilities.

This week, IBM said it is expanding Quiskit to include a new feature called Qiskit Patterns.

“Qiskit Patterns will serve as a mechanism to allow quantum developers to more easily create code. It is based in 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,” IBM stated. Along with Qiskit Patterns, IBM announced the deployment of Quantum Serverless as beta for managed, unattended execution of Patterns at scale.