D-Wave bags first commercial customer for D-Wave 2000Q quantum computer

Temporal Defense Systems will use quantum computer to "revolutionise secure communications"

Quantum computer developer D-Wave Systems has announced its first commercial customer for the company's D-Wave 2000Q quantum computer system - the cyber security company Temporal Defense Systems (TDS).

The D-Wave 2000Q boasts 2000 qubits and new control features and continues D-Wave's record of doubling the number of qubits on its quantum processing units (QPUs) every two years.

The new anneal offsets control feature, the company claims, enables users to tune the annealing of individual qubits. Combined with a faster annealing time over previous D-Wave systems, problems can be solved more efficiently, improving application performance.

TDS chief technology officer James Burrell claimed that the new hardware would "revolutionise secure communications, protect against insider threats, and assist in the identification of cyber adversaries and attack patterns".

He added: "Combining the unique computational capabilities of a quantum computer with the most advanced cyber security technologies will deliver the highest level of security, focused on both prevention and attribution of cyber attacks."

The system reportedly cost the company about $15m.

In benchmarks, the company claims that the D-Wave QPUs outperformed competitive classical algorithms by 1000 to 10000 times in pure computation time. It added that the benchmarks were designed to represent the structure of common real-world problems. The benchmark comparisons were relative to single CPU cores and 2500-core GPUs at the largest problem size.

The company also claimed that the machine "outperformed GPU-based implementations by 100 times in equivalent problem solving performance per watt". It added that the power draw of D-Wave's hardware has remained constant over successive generations, while "dramatically" increasing computation power.

Earl Joseph, vice president for high performance computing at analyst group IDC, described the new machine as "a major technical achievement and an important advance for the emerging field of quantum computing".

He added: "D-Wave is the only company with a product designed to run quantum computing problems, and the new D-Wave 2000Q system should be even more interesting to researchers and application developers who want to explore this revolutionary new approach to computing."

D-Wave, based in British Columbia, Canada, has been developing quantum computers since 1999, but only got round to releasing the "world's first commercially available quantum computer", operating on a 128-qubit chipset, in May 2011.

It has, therefore, so far only sold a handful of systems, with Google and NASA among its most prominent users.

In May 2013, the company launched a collaboration with NASA, Google and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) to open the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, which deployed the D-Wave Two 512-qubit quantum computers to research machine learning.

And in August 2015, D-Wave Systems announced the general availability of the D-Wave 2X system, a 1000+ qubit quantum computer. This was followed by an announcement in September 2015 that it had installed a D-Wave 2X system at the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at NASA Ames Research Center.

In other words, sales of D-Wave's systems have been few and far between.

Earlier this month, in a bid to pump up the software and developer eco-system for quantum computing, the company open sourced its software development tool qbsolv - although it might equally also be a way of cutting costs.

However, it is widely agreed that quantum computing is still a decade or more from going fully mainstream, even if some organisations can find niche applications for the quantum computers available today.