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TROY, N.Y. (NEWS10) The quantum craze landing at RPIs campus, but while theyre not shooting the next Marvel movie, they are making pretty cool moves in the realm of computer sciences.

RPI announces its Alan M. Voorhees Computing Center will soon be the home of IBMs Quantum System Onea quantum computer and the first to be in any university around the world.

Its obviously much faster in terms of computing power, but its not just we made it 10 times faster and you can use the same codes. Its we made it 1000 times faster and you have to write a whole bunch of new codes, explains John Kolb, the vice president of information services at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and its chief information officer.

Kolb tries to make it simple for NEWS10s Mikhaela Singleton during a tour Wednesday in order to explain just how revolutionary this technology is. He says a quantum computer can solve every problem too complex for your desktop that can only process straightforward problems answered by 1s and 0s.

He says this technology can make millions of probabilities based on a wealth of data. For instance, he predicts it will fit well with RPIs exiting AI research.

Weve been very heavily a leader in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and these systems will help some of the learning processes, he says.

Its not just the next generation of machines this quantum computer will be able to advance. Kolb says this can also help move medical research leaps and bounds.

He says RPI last year launched a precision medicine center in partnership with Mount Sinai focusing on biomedical engineering research. In order to make predictions on diseases, drug side effects, and any number of factors that can change a persons health, he says the quantum computer could go beyond simple family medical history by examining outcomes from many people.

If you have a sample of two or three, doesnt quite work. If you have a sample of eight million people in New York City, well now youre starting to get somewhere, but how do you crunch that in a way that you actually get answers that then come back to you and say well heres the medicine that you need, Kolb explains.

IBM will help build and assemble the System One with a completion date around January 2024. Kolb foresees every RPI student taking future courses on quantum computing, poising the Capital Region to rival Silicon Valley and other hubs of technology and talent.

The question becomes how do we create the next generation of applications and train the workforce and help educate that workforce for what those applications will do. We are not only getting the advantage of a system that IBM made, we are also developing the leaders that will develop the next generation of systems for IBM and others, he says.

This is a huge deal for our economy. This will this is something thats gonna carry us for decades, Kolb goes on to say.

The rest is here:
RPI to become only university worldwide with IBM quantum computer - NEWS10 ABC