Build on Quantum simulators today to help realise the UK's strategy for Quantum computing
It’s the demand pull we need from customers to complement the Government’s early investment and accelerate the commercialisation of Quantum Computing across the UK in line with the National Quantum Strategy. It’s up to us, the companies with teams of talented engineers and research institutions across the country, to develop applications which demonstrate real Quantum Advantage. Better put, it’s showing real business value so end-users can have confidence that it’s worthwhile make their own investments in the technology, now.
Quantum advantage, today
The most significant, production ready, advantage we've seen so far is within Financial Services. The ‘Quantum Kernel Method’ proves excellent at completing classification tasks; in the case of fraud prevention, it’s even outperformed the current best-in-class classical machine learning methods. The small improvement in AUC (Area Under Curve – an important metric used to assess classification task performance) resulted in a 15-17% reduction in total losses for one financial institution.
Getting us there – Quantum Simulators
What we know now is the development of powerful-enough Quantum Computers with a low-enough shot cost isn’t a precondition for us be successful: we can use specially designed Quantum Simulators, powered by top-of-the-line GPUs as part of our overall development strategy. This has helped our engineers to build and experiment quickly and enables the demonstration of real business value for customers in a production environment. These Quantum Simulators work by simulating the quantum operations of a real Quantum Computer, enabling engineers to do the same mathematical operations they would want to do on the real thing.
For us, this has helped our team bridge both the capability and cost gap in the short term, while Quantum Computing companies around the world work tirelessly to build and scale their systems. In the future their work will unlock larger and even more complex applications, significantly increasing the number of opportunities for end-users to realise Quantum Advantage across their businesses.
Building the right system for the job
The High Performance Compute (HPC) specialists from our System Integration partner Boston Limited worked closely with us to build an optimised Quantum Simulator hardware stack using top of the line NVIDIA GPUs. They jumped at the opportunity to engage with SECQAI’s Software Engineers to ensure the simulation software stack was also optimised for the system to supercharge our work on developing Quantum algorithms and Quantum Machine Learning applications.
The business case
For us it’s been simple: enabling our development teams to work fast, cheaply. Using Boston’s kit, they’ve been able to iteratively build, test and train at a pace comparable to classical algorithm development on a traditional HPC stack, while doing so at a fraction of the cost of everyday usage of a Quantum Computer. It’s proven to be the perfect bridge between our day-to-day development work and deployment on the different Quantum Compute architectures we’re building for.
For all of us at the moment, the cost of accessing Quantum Computing resource is significant. We’ve seen a 10x reduction in cost for running the same compute tasks on a Quantum Simulator compared with a commercial Quantum Computer. We can fine tune this with the noise we expect to see on each of the Quantum platforms we’ll be deploying on, helping us operate under conditions that are as realistic as possible.
What's next?
We should all take advantage of the technology that’s at our fingertips in the HPC world to bridge the compute gap. This is while Quantum Computing leaders continue to build the critical hardware for scaling Quantum in the near future, all at a price point that works for our businesses. In the meantime, we can build more, faster, and have a greater impact for end-users. We believe that doing so, today, will convince customers that now is the right time to invest in their Quantum programmes. Such a demand pull in our market economy will help supercharge the critical investments already made by the UK Government across the Quantum industry. Not only will we accelerate the industry’s growth but deliver significant business value across the economy where these new tools are deployed.
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techUK – Unleashing UK Tech and Innovation
The UK is home to emerging technologies that have the power to revolutionise entire industries. From quantum to semiconductors; from gaming to the New Space Economy, they all have the unique opportunity to help prepare for what comes next.
techUK members lead the development of these technologies. Together we are working with Government and other stakeholders to address tech innovation priorities and build an innovation ecosystem that will benefit people, society, economy and the planet - and unleash the UK as a global leader in tech and innovation.
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