D-Wave delights in Davidson’s deployment of Advantage system in Huntsville
D-Wave is having quite a ball at its Qubits 2024 user conference in Boston this week, as the company announced that aerospace and defense firm Davidson Technologies, an existing D-Wave partner, is deploying a D-Wave Advantage annealing quantum computer at its new global headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama.
The placement at Davidson will represent the second U.S.-based deployment of the Advantage machine; the company also has had an Advantage quantum computer deployed at the University of Southern California, as well as other locations outside the U.S.
Davidson performs technology and engineering work on behalf of the U.S. Department of Defense, among other customers, and the new system eventually be housed in a secure facility developed to run sensitive applications using quantum computing technology–and may be used specifically for those purposes. However, initially and until that facility is ready, the Advantage system at Davidson will be accessible to all D-Wave customers located in select countries via the Leap real-time quantum cloud service, according to D-Wave. That period of availability potentially will allow more U.S.-based users who have not yet tried D-Wave’s annealing technology to take it for a spin on their own optimization problems.
“Davidson has a track record of embracing emerging and advanced technologies to address unique and critical national defense challenges and protect our nation’s interests,” said Dr. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave. “By placing an Advantage quantum computing system onsite at Davidson’s headquarters and creating a unique environment for operation, we’re opening up opportunities to tackle the US government’s most pressing computational problems.”
“By housing the second U.S.-based Advantage quantum computer at our facility in Huntsville, we will provide our government customers with unprecedented access to quantum computing technology in our facility,” said Dale Moore, President of Davidson Technologies. “We’re honored to host a D-Wave Advantage computer and believe this will greatly advance quantum’s role in national security, as we support the critical mission of defending the U.S. and its allies, both at home and abroad.”
D-Wave and Davidson first announced a partnership at the beginning of 2023 to bring quantum computing to Davidson’s markets, and since then have developed new applications, while Davidson has been a vocal supporter of D-Wave’s approach to quantum computing.
Meanwhile, the announcement with Davidson came just after D-Wave also announced the launch of a new hybrid quantum solver that company officials demonstrated live during the conference. The solver, aimed at complex problems like production scheduling, supports up to two million variables and constraints, with a tenfold increase in problem size capacity over other D-Wave solvers for certain applications, according to preliminary benchmarking studies, the company said. It is part of D-Wave’s expanding set of commercial quantum optimization offerings, supporting the company’s aggressive go-to-market (GTM) growth strategy announced earlier this year.
Dan O’Shea has covered telecommunications and related topics including semiconductors, sensors, retail systems, digital payments and quantum computing/technology for over 25 years.
