The history of computing hardware covers the developments from early simple devices to aid calculation to modern day computers.
Blue Gene was an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with low power consumption.
This is a timeline of quantum computing.
Lov Kumar Grover is an Indian-American computer scientist. He is the originator of the Grover database search algorithm used in quantum computing. Grover's 1996 algorithm won renown as the second major algorithm proposed for quantum computing, and in 2017 was finally implemented in a scalable physical quantum system. Grover's algorithm has been the subject of numerous popular science articles.
IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research organization in the world and has twelve labs on six continents.
Charles Henry Bennett is a physicist, information theorist and IBM Fellow at IBM Research. Bennett's recent work at IBM has concentrated on a re-examination of the physical basis of information, applying quantum physics to the problems surrounding information exchange. He has played a major role in elucidating the interconnections between physics and information, particularly in the realm of quantum computation, but also in cellular automata and reversible computing. He discovered, with Gilles Brassard, the concept of quantum cryptography and is one of the founding fathers of modern quantum information theory.
Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technological innovation in collaboration with academic, government, and industry researchers. The Microsoft Research team has more than 1,000 computer scientists, physicists, engineers, and mathematicians, including Turing Award winners, Fields Medal winners, MacArthur Fellows, and Dijkstra Prize winners.
D-Wave Quantum Systems Inc. is a Canadian quantum computing company, based in Burnaby, British Columbia. D-Wave claims to be the world's first company to sell computers that exploit quantum effects in their operation. D-Wave's early customers include Lockheed Martin, University of Southern California, Google/NASA and Los Alamos National Lab.
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL benchmarks, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.
Hartmut Neven is a scientist working in quantum computing, computer vision, robotics and computational neuroscience. He is best known for his work in face and object recognition and his contributions to quantum machine learning. He is currently Vice President of Engineering at Google where he is leading the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab which he founded in 2012.
Map Project Office is an industrial design studio based in Central London, working with both major brands and start-ups in the consumer technology space. The studio works with abstract technologies in the artificial intelligence, augmented reality and the IoT sectors, creating accessible experiences for the end user.
The Hartree Centre is a high performance computing, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) research facility focused on industry-led challenges. It was formed in 2012 at Daresbury Laboratory on the Sci-Tech Daresbury science and innovation campus in Cheshire, UK. The Hartree Centre is part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) which itself is part of United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI).
IBM Quantum Platform is an online platform allowing public and premium access to cloud-based quantum computing services provided by IBM. This includes access to a set of IBM's prototype quantum processors, a set of tutorials on quantum computation, and access to an interactive textbook. As of February 2021, there are over 20 devices on the service, six of which are freely available for the public. This service can be used to run algorithms and experiments, and explore tutorials and simulations around what might be possible with quantum computing.
Cloud-based quantum computing is the invocation of quantum emulators, simulators or processors through the cloud. Increasingly, cloud services are being looked on as the method for providing access to quantum processing. Quantum computers achieve their massive computing power by initiating quantum physics into processing power and when users are allowed access to these quantum-powered computers through the internet it is known as quantum computing within the cloud.
In quantum computing, quantum supremacy or quantum advantage is the goal of demonstrating that a programmable quantum computer can solve a problem that no classical computer can solve in any feasible amount of time, irrespective of the usefulness of the problem. The term was coined by John Preskill in 2012, but the concept dates back to Yuri Manin's 1980 and Richard Feynman's 1981 proposals of quantum computing.
Quantum volume is a metric that measures the capabilities and error rates of a quantum computer. It expresses the maximum size of square quantum circuits that can be implemented successfully by the computer. The form of the circuits is independent from the quantum computer architecture, but compiler can transform and optimize it to take advantage of the computer's features. Thus, quantum volumes for different architectures can be compared.
Qiskit is an open-source software development kit (SDK) for working with quantum computers at the level of circuits, pulses, and algorithms. It provides tools for creating and manipulating quantum programs and running them on prototype quantum devices on IBM Quantum Platform or on simulators on a local computer. It follows the circuit model for universal quantum computation, and can be used for any quantum hardware that follows this model.
Hanhee Paik is a South Korean experimental quantum computing researcher who works for IBM Research at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where she helps develop superconducting devices for storing and operating on qubits.
