D-Wave Unveils New Quantum Computing Capabilities

Reverse annealing feature will provide a 150x speedup over current systems.

Quantum computing pioneer D-Wave has announced a major upgrade for its D-Wave 2000Q quantum computers. The upgrade will arrive sometime in the first quarter of 2018.

The enhanced system will support reverse annealing. According to D-Wave, “Reverse annealing lets users program the system in an entirely new way, harnessing powerful heuristic search algorithms for optimization and machine learning, and applications such as cybersecurity, and drug discovery. Reverse annealing allows users to specify the problem they wish to solve along with a predicted solution in order to narrow the search space for the computation. The predicted solution may be a result of a previous quantum or classical computation, or an educated guess. Using reverse annealing, D-Wave researchers observed a 150 times speedup over the current D-Wave 2000Q system.”

The upgrade also provides support for virtual graphs. D-Wave’s 2000Q quantum computer is available for on-site installations and also on a cloud subscription basis.