Microsoft Announces Roadmap to Building First True Quantum Supercomputer

Microsoft believes that the road to quantum computing is not very different from the road to today's supercomputers.

Microsoft has announced plans to build its own quantum supercomputer. In a roadmap released Wednesday, the company says  quantum supercomputing has the potential to solve food insecurity and reverse climate change by revolutionizing chemistry. There are  several milestones ahead, including a move from noisy physical qubits to powerful logical qubits, but once they are reached, quantum machines "could solve some of the toughest problems facing our society."

Microsoft believes that the road to quantum computing is not very different from the road to today's classic supercomputers. With this in mind, the company has listed three major milestones that  need to be overcome before programmable quantum supercomputers can solve problems that today's computers cannot solve.

Current development is at a rudimentary level, and current test machines are built on "noisy" physical qubits that aren't good enough to solve real-world problems. For the uninitiated, a qubit is the quantum computing equivalent of a bit to a standard computer.

Microsoft bundles these machines  (including  IonQ, Pasqal, Quantinuum, QCI, and Rigetti) into Azure Quantum Elements. Azure Quantum Elements is a new service that accelerates scientific discovery by integrating the latest advances in high-performance computing (HPC).

As soon as the reliability of individual qubits increases, advances in quantum computing  will move to fault-tolerant levels. This stage is reached when it is possible to combine thousands of physical qubits into  logical qubits. However, this requires that the error rate of the physical qubit be below a certain threshold. Otherwise, error correction will fail.

Finally, the third level  is reached when we can develop scalable and programmable quantum supercomputers that can outperform conventional supercomputers in solving problems.

Clearly, there is much work  to be done before quantum computers  reach their final level. The first quantum supercomputer should deliver an error rate of just one per trillion operations. Looking back,  early computing pioneers had to overcome similar obstacles in the transition from vacuum tubes to transistors and integrated circuits.

However, Microsoft has many rivals in the supercomputer race, such as IBM and IonQ, who share similar ambitions. However, the company could benefit slightly from the major breakthroughs it achieved last year. His team demonstrated the ability to create more stable qubits based on Majorana particles that use topological insulators to shield them from environmental noise.