It’s hard to be a technology leader, especially when the technology you’re touting is bleeding edge.
That’s what British Columbia’s D-Wave Systems is finding out in its quest to commercialize quantum computing.
According to a report from ComputerWorld U.S., IBM and researchers at the University of California have asked questions about whether one of D-Wave’s experimental computers used by Google is really relying on quantum mechanics.
Researchers have developed a model that they say shows that for a given problem solved by a D-Wave computer a similar result could have been achieved through a standard process.
But Colin Williams, D-Wave’s business development director, says what has to be looked at is all of the results, not just one computation.
I won’t pretend to understand the mechanics of quantum computing (sorry), but there’s a lot riding on this. Organizations have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in standard servers, and the demand for crunching data won’t slack for the foreseeable future. The scrutiny over any work on quantum computing is also only going to increase
The company says its flagship server is the 512-qubit D-Wave Two, which is built around a type of superconducting processor that uses quantum mechanics to massively accelerate computation.