IBM and Riken, a national research laboratory in Japan, have unveiled the first quantum computer to be co-located with Riken’s supercomputer Fugaku.
Based in Kobe, Japan, the IBM Quantum System Two is also the first ever to be deployed outside of the US and beyond an IBM Quantum Data Center.
IBM Quantum System Two at Riken is powered by IBM’s 156-qubit IBM Quantum Heron, Big Blue’s best-performing quantum processor to date. Heron’s quality is measured by the two-qubit error rate across a 100-qubit layered circuit, which is 3×10-3 (with the best two-qubit error being 1×10-3).
IBM claims the Heron processors powering the Riken system are 10 times better than the previous generation 127-qubit IBM Quantum Eagle.
Its speed, as measured by the CLOPS (circuit layer operations per second) metric, is 250,000, which is reported to be a 10x improvement in the past year, over IBM Eagle. At a scale of 156 qubits, with these quality and speed metrics, Heron can therefore claim to be the most performant quantum processor in the world, capable of running quantum circuits on classical computers that go beyond brute-force simulations.
Fugaku, meet Heron
The IBM Quantum System Two is co-located with Fugaku, formerly the world’s fastest supercomputer, located within the RIKEN Center for Computational Science, Japan’s premier HPC center.
IBM reports that the computers come linked through a high-speed network at the fundamental instruction level to form a proving ground for quantum-centric supercomputing. This low-level integration enables Riken and IBM engineers to develop parallelized workloads, low-latency classical-quantum communication protocols, and advanced compilation passes and libraries.
Because quantum and classical systems ultimately offer different computational strengths, the Japan experiment provides the first field test of sorts for IBM’s ‘quantum-centric’ promise as actions on the supercomputer get offloaded to the quantum side of things.
There is also the potential to enable Riken teams to use quantum-centric supercomputing approaches to nudge Fugaku beyond the exascale threshold. With a quantum accelerator in the loop, benchmarks such as HPCG or HPL-AI could evolve drastically.
The launch of the IBM Quantum System Two at Riken came with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on June 24, a few short days after reports surfaced suggesting Washington plans to revoke waivers on some companies shipping US chip equipment to fabs in China.
With a key US ally getting the first IBM Quantum System Two outside of the US, the geopolitical optics are hard to miss.