A 16-qubit system, according to Kremlin, can simulate simple molecules. Researchers from the International Center for Quantum Optics and Quantum Technologies in Russia recently gave President Vladimir Putin a brand-new quantum computer, which they called the "most potent in Russia right now.".
It might appear ominous, but that is not the case. The US and its allies are probably relieved that the Russians don't appear to be close to breaking modern encryption, which is one of the worst consequences of quantum computing—assuming it's even possible).
When compared to Western systems developed by IBM, Dwave, and other companies that have built quantum systems with hundreds of qubits, the quantum computer has a shockingly small number of qubits—just 16—which is extremely few.
According to a blog post by Rosatom, the nation's government-run nuclear energy company, the trapped-ion design Russian quantum system has been under development since 2015.
Additionally, scientists have "launched an algorithm for computing a simple molecule," according to a Kremlin press release, and demonstrated how it works in real time. It doesn't exactly sound as though there is a serious threat to Western security interests.
In a blog entry that was translated from Russian, Ilya Semerikov claimed that "our quantum computer, which is significant, is already doing useful things -- modeling molecules, and not doing scientific abstraction.".
While still in its infancy, quantum computing is predicted to one day speed up a variety of computationally intensive tasks, including drug research, material sciences, traffic congestion, supply chain, weather forecasting, and, yes, cryptography.
Fujitsu's research indicates that RSA can only be cracked using a fault-tolerant quantum computer with at least 10,000 qubits and 2.23 trillion quantum gates. Even so, some claim that anyone who puts forth the effort will have to sift through a mountain of garbage in order to find a gem.
This hasn't stopped the development of these technologies, which have received millions of dollars in funding from both the public and private sectors. In the past year, we have taken note of various Chinese reports mentioning investments in computer development and quantum code breaking.
Although the truth of such claims is questionable, it appears that the US military is taking no chances. In an effort to advance the development of quantum system architectures, the Defense Advanced Research Agency (DARPA) and Microsoft, Atom, and PsiQuantum launched the Underexplored Systems for Utility-Scale Quantum Computing (US2QC) program in February. The agency expressed concerns regarding the potential for future quantum technologies to defeat current encryption.
With assistance from the Universities of Tokyo and Chicago, IBM has committed $100 million to the creation of a 100,000 qubit "quantum-centric supercomputer" within a ten-year time frame.
But as we've already mentioned, if there is any chance of achieving a quantum advantage, we will need to build much larger quantum systems as well as more efficient algorithms to take advantage of them.
According to research conducted by Microsoft researchers and the Scalable Parallel Computing Laboratory in Zurich and published in May, even a quantum system with 10,000 error-correcting qubits, or roughly a million physical qubits, would struggle to compete with a single Nvidia A100 GPU in many workloads.
This in itself has sparked research into quantum emulation to give developers a way to test out quantum algorithms on conventional hardware while they wait for commercial systems to become broadly accessible.
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