Quantum News Briefs July 20: Monetary Authority of Singapore announces additional $74m funding for quantum and AI technologies • Nvidia claims breakthrough on path to GPU-based quantum computing •
In Other News:
Crowd Fund Adviser reports “Monetary Authority of Singapore announces additional $74m funding for quantum and AI technologies””
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) announced an additional commitment of S$100 million (about $74 million) under the Financial Sector Technology and Innovation Grant Scheme (FSTI 3.0), according to July 18 CrowdFundInsider.
This funding aims to bolster financial institutions in developing quantum and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities and foster the innovation and adoption of these technologies within the financial services sector.
Following the announcement of the National Quantum Strategy by Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat in May 2024, MAS has been collaborating with the National Quantum Office.
To support the development of quantum capabilities, MAS will establish a Quantum track under FSTI 3.0.
The Quantum track will include several grants. The Technology Centres grant will support the establishment of quantum computing and security innovation functions in Singapore, offering up to 50% funding for manpower and other qualifying expenses for 24 months.
In Other News: Cointelegraph reports “Nvidia claims breakthrough on path to GPU-based quantum computing”
Nvidia researchers are claiming noteworthy progress in the quest to build a fully functional, commercially viable quantum computer based on supercomputer simulations conducted with graphical processing units (GPUs) according to Tristan Green in his July 19 article in CoinTelegraph.
Nvidia is working towards the development of a quantum annealing system. Its vast experience with GPUs, in both the gaming and artificial intelligence sectors, puts it in a unique position to pursue quantum computing research via supercomputer simulations.
Nvidia researchers tapped hundreds of thousands of GPUs, in several separate clusters, to simulate the behavior of a quantum annealing system. These kinds of simulations are typically performed on supercomputers.But Nvidia’s pioneering GPUs give it a powerful alternative.
Through simulations, the team was able to come up with a proposed solution involving the manipulation of magnetic fields. Once implemented, this could bring full-service quantum annealers a step closer to market.
Green also points out to his crypto audience, “Quantum annealing systems could impact the finance and blockchain industries in a major way.”
In Other News: “ORNL’s frontier supercomputer advances quantum chemistry at exascale”
The world’s most powerful supercomputer has raised the bar for calculating the number of atoms in a molecular dynamics simulation 1,000 times greater in size and speed than any previous simulation of its kind, according to ORNL communique on July 17.
It is the first time-resolved quantum chemistry simulation to exceed an exaflop — over a quintillion, or a billion-billion calculations per second — using double-precision arithmetic. The 16 decimal places provided by double precision is computationally demanding, but the additional precision is required for many scientific problems. In addition to setting a new benchmark, the achievement also provides a blueprint for enhancing algorithms to tackle larger, more complex scientific problems using leadership-class exascale supercomputers.
The team is currently working to prepare their results for scientific publication. After that, they plan to use the high accuracy simulations to train machine learning models and integrate artificial intelligence into the algorithm. The improvements will provide an entirely new level of sophistication and efficiency for solving even larger and more complex problems.
