It May Be Too Early to Prepare Your Data Center for Quantum Computing

Depending on who you ask, quantum computing is expected to become somewhat commonplace between five and 10 years from now.

You can already try simulations of quantum computers and even take some early real quantum machines for a spin through cloud providers, such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud. They all have pilot quantum computing projects in various stages of progress.

Does this mean that data center operators need to start making plans for rows of rack-mounted quantum computers in their facilities? That depends on which of the technologies currently under development take hold, Dr. Celia Merzbacher, executive director of the Quantum Economic Development Consortium, told DCK.

"The early lead is with IBM and Google right now, and they are working using a technology that requires very low temperatures," she said. "There's a lot of infrastructure around the processor that is pretty big and cumbersome and is in some sense kind of hard to scale, but they're working on it."

Other quantum computing technologies under development don't require cooling core components to nearly absolute zero (-460F), as IBM and Google's systems require. If they succeed in the market, quantum computing will be less likely to remain confined to being primarily a public cloud offering.

In her keynote at Data Center World next week in Orlando, Dr. Celia Merzbacher, executive director of the Quantum Economic Development Consortium, will explain what the arrival of quantum computing will mean for the data center industry. Register to come to the event or stream the presentations here.

Honeywell and the startup IonQ are each developing quantum computers using "trapped ion" designs. Another startup, called PsiQuantum, is developing a quantum computer that uses photons as qubits, the quantum bits that are the basic unit of quantum information. Since none of these designs require drastic cooling, something that can be rack mounted and rolled onto the floor of a traditional data center might be possible.

Fundamental Questions About Quantum Computing Remain Unanswered

The fact that there are multiple radically different approaches to quantum computing under development, with no assurance that any will meet market success (let alone market dominance), speaks to quantum computing's infancy. Merzbacher compares the situation to the early days of microprocessors, when there was a debate on whether computer chips should be made of silicon or germanium.

"There were arguments for germanium. It's a better system for semiconductor computing in some sense, but it's expensive, not as easy to manufacture, and it's not as common, so in the end, it was silicon," she said. Quantum computing hasn't reached a point where "everybody settled on a technology here, and so there still is uncertainty. It may be that the IBM approach is better for certain types of computing, and then the trapped-ion approaches [are] better for others."

This past March, IonQ became the first publicly traded pure-play quantum computing company via a SPAC merger. According to Merzbacher, the startup appears to have its eye on marketing rack-mounted quantum hardware to the data center market, although it hasn't voiced such intentions publicly.

"Public talks and statements by their technical officers point in that direction," she said.

Will Quantum Computing Displace Classical Computing?

Whether quantum computing takes the form of cloud services, on-prem systems, or both, Merzbacher doesn't believe that it will suck a lot of market share away from traditional, binary, silicon-based computers.

"A standalone quantum computer certainly is not going to be a plug-in replacement for existing computers -- not even high-performance computers," she said. "There are some types of problems that a classical computer is always going to be better for."

What Will Quantum Computers Do?

Which areas quantum computing may dominate is still largely under investigation and isn't something we'll know until it reaches prime time.

One potential good fit is modeling energy states of materials or processes for the chemical industry.

"There are a lot of people who've pointed out for a long time that the processes by which we make fertilizer are incredibly energy intensive, and nature does a lot of processes like photosynthesis very energy efficiently," Merzbacher said. "We might be able to model those kinds of materials systems much more accurately, and that might allow us to come up with solutions to some of these persistent challenges that we just haven't been able to solve using conventional computing."

Quantum computing may also be a good fit for other efficiency-related use cases, such as air-traffic control and electric grid management.

"There are many logistics or optimization problems that quantum computing seems like it may be a relatively near-term solution for," she said. "It's also why, for instance, the financial sector is very interested in quantum computing. If they could come up with better optimization of portfolio analysis tools, that would be potentially pretty impactful for that sector."

Merzbacher recalled an observation made by the late theoretical physicist Richard Feynman in the 1980s, when quantum computing was barely an idea.

"Nature is quantum-based at the fundamental level," she said, citing Feynman. "And if you want to be able to model and compute nature, you need a quantum computer to do that. He didn't know what that meant or what a quantum computer would even look like, but he was saying, there are some kinds of problems that are just quantum in their bones, and trying to push them into a digital binary solution just is not a good fit."

In her keynote at Data Center World next week in Orlando, Dr. Celia Merzbacher, executive director of the Quantum Economic Development Consortium, will explain what the arrival of quantum computing will mean for the data center industry. Register to come to the event or stream the presentations here.