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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| D-Wave Systems | 2/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T11:06:52.071639+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Orion prototype === On February 13, 2007, D-Wave demonstrated the Orion system, running three different applications at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. This marked the first public demonstration of, supposedly, a quantum computer and associated service. The first application, an example of pattern matching, performed a search for a similar compound to a known drug within a database of molecules. The next application computed a seating arrangement for an event subject to compatibilities and incompatibilities between guests. The last involved solving a Sudoku puzzle. The processors at the heart of D-Wave's "Orion quantum computing system" are designed for use as hardware accelerator processors rather than general-purpose computer microprocessors. The system is designed to solve a particular NP-complete problem related to the two-dimensional Ising model in a magnetic field. D-Wave terms the device as a 16-qubit superconducting adiabatic quantum computer processor. According to the company, a conventional front-end running an application that requires the solution of an NP-complete problem, such as pattern matching, passes the problem to the Orion system. According to Geordie Rose, founder and Chief Technology Officer of D-Wave, NP-complete problems "are probably not exactly solvable, no matter how big, fast or advanced computers get"; the adiabatic quantum computer used by the Orion system is intended to quickly compute an approximate solution.
==== 2009 Google demonstration ==== On December 8, 2009, at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference, a Google research team led by Hartmut Neven used D-Wave's processor to train a binary image classifier.
=== D-Wave One === On May 11, 2011, D-Wave announced the D-Wave One, an integrated quantum computer system running on a 128-qubit processor. The processor used in the D-Wave One, performs a single mathematical operation, discrete optimization. Rainier uses quantum annealing to solve optimization problems. The D-Wave One was claimed to be the world's first commercially available quantum computer system. Its price was quoted at approximately US$10,000,000. A research team led by Matthias Troyer and Daniel Lidar found that, while there is evidence of quantum annealing in D-Wave One, they saw no speed increase compared to classical computers. They implemented an optimized classical algorithm to solve the same particular problem as the D-Wave One.
==== Lockheed Martin and D-Wave collaboration ==== In November 2010, Lockheed Martin signed a multi-year contract with D-Wave to realize the benefits based upon a quantum annealing processor applied to some of Lockheed's most challenging computation problems. The contract was later announced on May 25, 2011. The contract included the purchase of the D-Wave One quantum computer, maintenance, and associated professional services.
==== Optimization problem-solving in protein structure determination ==== In August 2012, a team of Harvard University researchers presented results of the largest protein-folding problem solved to date using a quantum computer. The researchers solved instances of a lattice protein folding model, known as the Miyazawa–Jernigan model, on a D-Wave One quantum computer.
=== D-Wave Two ===
In early 2012, D-Wave revealed a 512-qubit quantum computer, which was launched as a production processor in 2013. In May 2013, Catherine McGeoch, a consultant for D-Wave, published the first comparison of the technology against regular top-end desktop computers running an optimization algorithm. Using a configuration with 439 qubits, the system performed 3,600 times as fast as CPLEX, the best algorithm on the conventional machine, solving problems with 100 or more variables in half a second compared with half an hour. The results are presented at the Computing Frontiers 2013 conference. In March 2013, several groups of researchers at the Adiabatic Quantum Computing workshop at the Institute of Physics in London, England, produced evidence, though only indirect, of quantum entanglement in the D-Wave chips. In May 2013, it was announced that a collaboration between NASA, Google, and the USRA launched a Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division at Ames Research Center in California, using a 512-qubit D-Wave Two that would be used for research into machine learning, among other fields of study.
=== D-Wave 2X and D-Wave 2000Q ===
On August 20, 2015, D-Wave released the general availability of their D-Wave 2X computer, with 1000 qubits in a Chimera graph architecture (although, due to magnetic offsets and manufacturing variability inherent in the superconductor circuit fabrication, fewer than 1152 qubits are functional and available for use; the exact number of qubits yielded will vary with each specific processor manufactured). This was accompanied by a report comparing speeds with high-end single-threaded CPUs. Unlike previous reports, this one explicitly stated that the question of quantum speedup was not something they were trying to address, and focused on constant-factor performance gains over classical hardware. For general-purpose problems, a speedup of 15x was reported, but it is worth noting that these classical algorithms benefit efficiently from parallelization—so that the computer would be performing on par with, perhaps, 30 traditional high-end single-threaded cores. The D-Wave 2X processor is based on a 2048-qubit chip with half of the qubits disabled; these were activated in the D-Wave 2000Q.
=== Advantage === In February 2019, D-Wave announced the next-generation system that would become the Advantage and delivered that system in 2020. The Advantage architecture would increase the total number of qubits to 5760 and switch to the Pegasus graph topology, increasing the per-qubit connections to 15. D-Wave claimed the Advantage architecture provided a 10x speedup in time-to-solve over the 2000Q product offering. D-Wave claims that an incremental follow-up Advantage Performance Update provides a 2x speedup over Advantage and a 20x speedup over 2000Q, among other improvements.
=== Advantage2 === In 2021, D-Wave announced the next-generation system that would become the Advantage2 with delivery expected in late 2024 or early 2025. The Advantage architecture was expected to increase the total number of qubits to over 7000 and switch to the Zephyr graph topology, increasing the per-qubit connections to 20. As of July 17, 2025, the manufacturer claimed a "4,400+ qubit system" was generally available.