D-Wave Two (project code name Vesuvius) is the second commercially-available quantum computer, and the successor to the first commercially-available quantum computer, D-Wave One. Both computers were developed by D-Wave Systems.[1] The computers are designed foradiabatic quantum computation.
D-Wave Two boasts a 512-qubit CPU, a vast improvement on the D-Wave One, which has a 128-qubit CPU.[2] If each qubit were in direct communication with every other qubit, then a 512-qubit machine would be over 100 orders of magnitude more powerful than a 128-qubit machine[3]but, because each qubit in the D-Wave architecture communicates directly with only six other qubits, the D-Wave Two is estimated to be about 300,000 times more powerful than the D-Wave One.[4]
In March 2013, several groups of researchers at the Adiabatic Quantum Computing workshop at the Institute of Physics in London produced evidence of quantum entanglement in D-Wave CPUs.[5]
In May 2013, Catherine McGeoch, whom D-Wave hired as a consultant, published the first comparison of D-Wave's quantum computing technology against top-end workstations running a mathematical optimization algorithm. Using a configuration with 439 qubits, the system performed 3,600 times as fast as the best algorithm (CPLEX) on the conventional computer, solving problems with 100 or more variables in half a second compared with half an hour. However, she admitted that the comparison is "not quite fair, because generic computers will always perform less well than a device dedicated to solving a specific problem".[6] The results were presented at the Computing Frontiers 2013 conference.[7]
A D-Wave Two in the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Division of Ames Research Center is used for research into machine learning and related fields of study. NASA, Google, and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) started the lab in 2013.[8][9][10][11]
