The race to realise quantum computing dream

Wiping our shoes, we enter a sparkling glass-walled room with vibration-absorbent floors and separate dedicated earthing.

- Shweta Taneja

The IBM Quantum System Two quantum computer.

(AFP)

A cylinder hangs in the middle with gold-plated copper layers sitting inside a dilution refrigerator. Wires, cables, monitors and pipes emerge in and out of the cylinder like an organised Hydra. Some pipes go into two other rooms ~ one houses the compressed helium, the other one the invertor. The cables go into racks that further feed into computers. A loud cling-cling sound of the pulse tube overwhelms the glassed-in room, making talking difficult.

All of this infrastructure, as well as the 150 people team of startup QPiAI revolve around one 6cem-sized, 64-qubit quantum processing chip that this cylinder houses. It's the heart of India’s first full-stack quantum computer, Indus, which at 25-qubit processing power, is the most powerful in the country. Wrapped around this cylinder are all our hopes to be part of the quantum race.

A quantum computer is dramatically different from the computers we have — our laptops, desktops and smartphones. Unlike classical computers that use mechanics and electric switches to process information, quantum computers use quantum mechanics and the physics of very small subatomic particles to perform calculations at a much faster scale. Last month, Google, one of the pioneers in quantum computers, released research that proved that a quantum processor is 13,000 times faster than even the fastest classical supercomputer. Google's Willow, released last year, performed a computation in under five minutes that would take the fastest supercomputers we have today, 10 septillion years to solve. No wonder everyone wants to develop this technology. The US, China and the EU have put in $1 billion each to develop indigenous versions. India’s National Quantum Mission is pushing to develop this ecosystem in academia and in startups.