Communications of the ACM
Boston Startup Says It Made a Quantum Leap in Computing
In July, the companys scientists published a paper describing a quantum computer with a capacity of 256 qubits.
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Boston startup QuEra Computing says it's developed the world's most powerful quantum computers. The company has raised $17 million to commercialize the new systems, which were developed by researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It plans to make them available to scientists and businesses looking to tackle problems far too complex for even the most muscular standard supercomputers.
"Quantum computing is a new way of thinking about computing," said QuEra's chief executive, Alexander Keesling, a Harvard-trained physicist who co-developed the technology. "It's not just like the next generation of existing systems."
Unlike today's "classical" computers that rely on bits of digital data stored in electronic circuits, QuEra's quantum computer uses lasers to control the state of individual atoms, called "qubits." In a classical computer, a data bit can only be in one of two states, zero or one. In a quantum computer, a qubit can simultaneously be equal to zero and one. As a result, a qubit-based computer can process massively greater amounts of data than any classical computer.
From The Boston Globe
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