Cloud Hosting

A full stackWith Mundies backing, Freedman set up a lab in Santa Barbara, California, and began recruiting some of the worlds pre-eminent condensed-matter and theoretical physicists, materials scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists to work on building the topological qubit. That team now boasts many leading quantum experts who have joined Microsoft as employees in the past year, including Leo Kouwenhoven, Charles Marcus, David Reilly and Matthias Troyer.

To create the infrastructure for a full computing platform, Microsoft has simultaneously worked on building hardware, software and programming languages for topological quantum computing.

At Ignite on Monday, Microsoft announced the latest milestone in its effort to build a full stack: A new programming language that is designed for developers to create apps to debug on quantum simulators today and run on an actual topological quantum computer in the future.

The same code that youre running today in simulation you can run tomorrow on our quantum computer, Svore said.

Svore said the new tools are designed for developers who are interested in being on the cutting-edge of computer advances the same type of people who were early adopters of machine learning and other artificial intelligence advances.

You dont have to be a quantum physicist to use them. The new programming language is deeply integrated into Visual Studio, and it includes the kinds of tools that developers rely on for classical computing, such as debugging and auto complete.

It shouldnt look too different from the things theyre already doing, Svore said.

The system, which will be available as a free preview by the end of the year, also includes libraries and tutorials so developers can familiarize themselves with quantum computing. Its designed to work at a higher level of abstraction, so that developers without quantum expertise can actually call quantum subroutines, or write sequences of programming instructions, working up to writing a complete quantum program. Developers can sign up to participate today.

The system is designed so that individual users can simulate problems that require up to 30 logical qubits of power on their own personal computers, and select enterprise customers, using Azure, can simulate more than 40 qubits of computational power.

In quantum computing, the power grows exponentially with the number of logical qubits. A logical qubit is the qubit at the level of the algorithm. At that hardware level, each logical qubit is represented in hardware by a number of physical qubits to enable protection of the logical information. Microsofts approach takes fewer topological qubits to develop one logical qubit, making it far easier to scale.

Svore said one key advantage to having a programming language that works in a simulation environment is that it will help people interested in using quantum computers to solve problems get a better sense of how to harness quantum power for different types of problems. That will accelerate their ability to take advantage of quantum computing when its available.

Read the original here:
Quantum computing - news.microsoft.com