Europe's First Quantum Computer Goes Into Operation In Stuttgart

2023 Author : Hannah Pearcy | [email protected] . Last modified: 2023-06-01 01:49

A recently agreed cooperation between the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft and IBM is intended to advance quantum computing in Germany. To this end, an IBM Q System One quantum computer will go into operation in Stuttgart at the beginning of 2021 . It will be the first of its kind in Europe

As of April 1, 2020, interested companies and research institutions will have access to the world's largest group of IBM quantum computers, which currently comprises 15 systems and is installed in the US state of New York, through the cloud.

The IBM Q System One system

The IBM Q System One is optimized to ensure the quality, stability, reliability and reproducibility of multi-qubit applications. Due to these factors and the resulting high quantum volume (a measure of the performance of a quantum computer), the IBM Q System One enables the most modern research work for specific application scenarios in science and industry.

IBM has been making quantum computers available free of charge via the cloud since 2016. As of today, more than 200,000 users have already taken the opportunity to send signals based on special algorithms to the computers. The corresponding software called Qiskit has been downloaded more than 300,000 times and over 200 scientific papers on experiments have been published on the platform.

A national Fraunhofer competence network for quantum computing wants to coordinate partners from research and industry. This has set itself the goal of further developing and transferring application-oriented quantum computer strategies under complete data sovereignty in accordance with European law.

According to Fraunhofer President Prof. Reimund Neugebauer, quantum computing has the potential to analyze complex systems in business and industry, to unbundle molecular and chemical interactions, to deal with complicated optimization problems and to make artificial intelligence significantly more efficient. He explains: "Such advances could open the door to new scientific knowledge and enormous improvements, for example in supply chains, logistics and the modeling of financial data, as well as problems in classic engineering."