IBM Quantum

Take a look inside our brand new IBM Quantum Data Center in Ehningen, Germany. Yesterday, we officially opened our new global quantum data center in Germany—our second globally and our first in Europe. It is now home to two advanced, utility-scale quantum systems that can perform at a level beyond the brute-force capabilities of classical systems, and will soon include an IBM Quantum Heron-based quantum computer: our most performant system to date. We are thrilled to offer our global ecosystem - including the more than 80 IBM Quantum Network members in Europe - the opportunity to work with real and high-performing quantum hardware to continue advancing the global discovery of quantum algorithms and exploration of problems across healthcare, materials, optimization, and more. Head to the IBM Quantum Blog for more: https://ibm.co/47OWxf4

The IBM Quantum Data Center in Europe is now open. https://ibm.co/3BotH9f Today, alongside German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Dr. Nicole Hoffmeister-Kraut—who serves as Minister for Economic Affairs, Labour, and Tourism for the State of Baden-Württemberg—IBM leaders Dario Gil, Ana Paula De Jesus Assis, Alessandro Curioni, Jay Gambetta, and Wolfgang Wendt officially cut the ribbon on IBM’s second quantum data center deployed in the world, and the first outside of the United States. The opening of the new facility in Ehningen, Germany was celebrated with an event that included a kickoff from Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna. It was commemorated with in-person panels and insights from many of our European-based partners, including Algorithmiq, Ikerbasque, Bosch, Crédit Mutuel, E.ON, Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, SAP, T-Systems International and Volkswagen Group, regarding how they plan to continue to use IBM Quantum systems to fuel the discovery of new quantum algorithms. Doing this work together with our worldwide ecosystem will help us achieve our mission of bringing useful quantum computing to the world. The IBM Quantum Data Center in Europe demonstrates our dedication to advancing access to the best quantum computers available today for the rapidly growing European and global quantum ecosystems. Our new data center in Ehningen currently comprises two utility-scale quantum computers, each of which is capable of solving problems beyond brute-force classical methods. It will soon add a third system housing the new IBM Quantum Heron R2: our most performant quantum processor to date. Our entire IBM Quantum Network of more than 250 organizations—including the 80-plus based in Europe—will now have the opportunity to access these systems housed within the new IBM Quantum Data Center. We can’t wait to see where these new resources will take them in our collaborative journey towards useful quantum computing.

We’ve expanded our IBM Quantum Data Center in Poughkeepsie, NY. https://ibm.co/4efA9yb This is exciting for two reasons—this data center now operates the highest number of available utility-scale quantum computers at a single location in the world, and those systems are all now equipped with our IBM Quantum Heron processors. These processors have shown a major improvement over their last generation counterpart, IBM Quantum Eagle—a 16x improvement in error rate, a massive increase in circuit layer operations per second, and more. Now that each system in our Poughkeepsie Data Center is fully enabled to run utility-scale operations, we expect this to expand quantum algorithm and application discovery further. We look forward to continuing equipping our clients and users with the most performant quantum software platform paired with the most powerful quantum hardware possible, and this is the next step in that commitment.

**Reminder** This Thursday, September 26, 2024, at 4:30 PM, the IBM HBCU Quantum Center will be live at Spelman College for the #Women in #Quantum Series. Please register using the link below for more details and location information. If you're out of state, don't worry! Save the date and register—IBM HBCU Quantum Center will also be live-streaming on LinkedIn and YouTube! Link: https://lnkd.in/gQ9EC2g2 

The verdict is in: Qiskit Functions is a game changer. https://ibm.co/3zzawsT Last week we introduced the Qiskit Functions Catalog, now available in preview for our Premium Plan users. Qiskit Functions are services that abstract away part of the quantum workflow in order to make quantum algorithm and application development easier, more accessible, and ultimately faster. Functions introduced by startups Algorithmiq, Q-CTRL, QEDMA, and QunaSys are the first third-party functions integrated into Qiskit, offering tools that range from simplifying interfaces to running quantum circuits to exploring domain-specific use cases to see where algorithms may have the largest impact. As the Qiskit Functions Catalog grows, we expect more companies and developers to integrate their own functions directly into Qiskit, unlocking more of the platform’s capabilities for all to use.

The Qiskit Fall Fest events are now live! https://ibm.co/3ZzLww9 Qiskit Fall Fest is just days away, and we couldn’t be more excited to share with you an in-depth look at some of the events you can attend. Hosted by 100 universities and institutions across the globe, this year’s Qiskit Fall Fest will feature a mix of both in-person and virtual events with many of them open for the public to join. Events range from quantum challenges, hackathons, and coding competitions to workshops, social events, guest speaker series—and more. We encourage you to check out the newly launched webpage where you can sort through all of the events this year to find the physical event closest to you geographically, or the virtual event that resonates with you most. We hope to see you there!

Join us Wednesday, October 16 at 11AM ET for an IBM Quantum Industry Webinar, focusing on utility scale quantum computing in the financial services industry. This event features IBM’s Dr. Manuel Proissl, Global IBM Quantum Applications Lead for Financial Services, and Senior Executive Advisor – AI & Quantum Solutions. Register here: https://ibm.co/3XwSWOj The financial sector could be an early industry to derive business value from quantum computing for certain sweet-spot use cases. In this webinar, challenges and respective opportunities for quantum algorithms in concert with classical financial modeling and data science will be discussed—ranging from managing risk, financial crime, investments to personalized customer experience.

Qiskit is the most performant quantum software development kit. In a new open source suite of over 1,000 benchmarking tests developed by leading universities, national labs, and IBM—the relative speed, and quality of quantum framework Qiskit offered in most tests are second-to-none. When measured against the closest leading quantum software development kits, Qiskit showed its overall speed in both the ability to build and manipulate quantum circuits, as well the speed in synthesizing and transpiling them. In regards to quality, Qiskit transpiled circuits with the lowest number of 2Q gates—in other words, needing far fewer operations when running circuits on hardware, therefore generating less noise and superior results. And finally, Qiskit was the only software that was able to complete all of the possible tests. These are just a few of the impressive results from a recently released paper sharing the results. There is still work to be done to scale Qiskit into the software requried to run programs on fault-tolerant quantum computers. But at the moment, Qiskit is the software that quantum users who care about performance should be using. Head to the IBM Quantum blog for a deeper dive on performance results: https://lnkd.in/eGN_xDme

Introducing the Qiskit Functions Catalog. https://ibm.co/4ekVzdj Qiskit Functions operates as a selection of services that will ultimately abstract away parts of the quantum workflow resulting in an acceleration of algorithm and application development, plus hopefully the discovery of enterprise-specific use cases. The Qiskit Functions Catalog is a platform which we hope will become the go-to place for developers to offer tools that extend utility-scale quantum computing for the ever-growing quantum community. The functions included are broken down into two categories: Circuit Functions and Application Functions. Circuit Functions work to simplify the interface for running circuits—shifting the focus for quantum computational scientists to map their problems to circuits, rather than building the pattern for each problem from scratch. Applications Functions allow users to work from a higher level view—users can explore domain-specific use cases and explore algorithms to easily experiment and see where quantum can be plugged in to their workflows. And today, startups Algorithmiq, Q-CTRL, QEDMA, and QunaSys will be the first to offer functions on the Qiskit Functions catalog. The Qiskit Functions catalog was built to not only make Qiskit more accessible, but more useful for both quantum developers and quantum computational scientists and enterprises to unlock more quantum computing capabilities together. Now available in preview for our Premium Plan users, head over to the IBM Quantum blog for more.

Qiskit is the highest-performing quantum software development kit for building and transpiling quantum circuits, based on the results of our benchmarking using over 1,000 tests developed by leading universities, national labs, and IBM, released in an open-source package today. https://ibm.co/4d7Vzvx Today we’re releasing those results in a paper on the arXiv where Qiskit was pitted against other leading quantum software development kits. The outcome is clear—Qiskit is the go-to quantum SDK for researchers and developers interested in performance. We will release the suite of tests today as part of an open-source package named Benchpress to enable the Quantum Industry to confirm and expand upon this analysis in order to provide meaningful comparisons between quantum SDKs. In our testing, Qiskit successfully completed the most tests and transpiled circuits with the best combination of speed and number of gates. For many of the tests, only Qiskit was feature-complete enough to be able to finish them. As this package is open source, we encourage you to run the tests on your own and contribute to Benchpress. We’re thrilled with the results of these tests, but there is still work ahead to continue scaling Qiskit. And we look forward to making the most-performant quantum software even more accessible, with details about the Qiskit Functions Catalog coming later today. Head over to the IBM Quantum blog for more about Qiskit's Performance.