Scientific Computing

Cat-qubit developer Alice & Bob plans to spend about $50 million on a 4,000-square-meter quantum lab in Paris, pairing Israeli quantum control system firm Quantum Machines control gear with 20 dilution refrigerators from Bluefors, a cryogenic systems maker, to speed its push toward fault-tolerant quantum chips and a 100-logical-qubit system by 2030. Alice & Bob…

The Quantum Economic Development Consortium has released a 28-page report, “Quantum Computing and Artificial Intelligence Use Cases,” setting out why the two technologies should be developed in tandem and what Washington, universities, and industry can do to speed that convergence. The document distills a Seattle workshop held October 29, 2024, that pulled in quantum engineers,…

Reducing performance-killing noise from chip substrates is key for advancing quantum computing. Addressing this challenge, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientists developed a practical chemical etching process that precisely lifts vital superconducting components, superinductors, just above the wafer surface. This suspension method directly targets stray capacitance and substrate-related loss channels by minimizing physical contact. The research…

Okay, deep breaths. Maybe you’ve heard the buzz around Google’s Ironwood TPUs, which generated at least one headline claiming its system offered a 24x performance boost over the world’s most advanced supercomputer, El Capitan. Or perhaps the news about Nvidia’s Blackwell line of GPUs, its forthcoming exaflop Vera Rubin platform, or xAI’s Colossus cluster, which…

Industry analysts from McKinsey to Omdia largely converge on a timeline for initial quantum advantage emerging in the next few years. While the era when quantum computers can routinely tackle large-scale challenges in fields like drug discovery and materials science might still be years away, IBM’s Quantum CTO, Oliver Dial, Ph.D., predicts the threshold of…

In a big step towards practical quantum computing applications, a collaboration involving JPMorgan Chase and Quantinuum has successfully used a quantum computer to generate verifiably random numbers. The team produced more than 70,000 certified random bits by tasking Quantinuum’s 56-qubit H2-1 trapped-ion processor with computations designed to be fundamentally challenging for classical machines. They detailed…

Could AI agents truly make sophisticated software development accessible to almost anyone? Codeium is betting on it, having attracted hundreds of thousands of users to its agent-native Windsurf IDE. There are opportunities galore in science, from education to automating research workflows. In terms of the former, imagine instructing an AI coding partner to build a…

A deep learning system known as Aardvark Weather offers accurate weather forecasts that are orders of magnitude quicker to generate than existing systems. Described in a Nature article (currently posted as a preprint), the system can generate predictions on four NVIDIA A100 GPUs that would otherwise take roughly 1,000 node-hours on a traditional supercomputer system…

According to the Quantum Economic Development Consortium’s (QED-C)  “2025 State of the Global Quantum Industry” report, the global quantum technology industry is experiencing unprecedented growth and investment. The report reveals a rapidly expanding market driven by advancements in quantum computing, sensing, and communication technologies, fueled by significant public and private funding. The following is a…

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang hosted the company’s first-ever “Quantum Day” at its GTC conference on Thursday, bringing together executives from across the quantum computing industry just two months after dismissing the technology as something that won’t be useful for “15 to 30 years.” In the immediate aftermath of Huang’s skepticism, shares of IonQ, Rigetti Computing,…

Quantinuum has been chosen as a founding collaborator in the upcoming NVIDIA Accelerated Quantum Research Center (NVAQC), an initiative to advance hybrid quantum-classical computing. Set to open later this year, the center will integrate Quantinuum’s System Model H2 — one of the highest-performing quantum systems—with NVIDIA’s CUDA-Q platform and the GB200 NVL72 supercomputer to enhance…

Late last year, Google announced that its “Willow” quantum chip hammered through a calculation under minutes that would take one of the world’s fastest supercomputers 10 septillion years to handle. Now, D-Wave has shown that its superconducting quantum annealing processors can simulate the complex dynamics of quantum materials in moments what would take the Frontier…

One might assume that galaxies in our universe would have no favored spin, rotating randomly either clockwise or counterclockwise. Yet a recent discovery from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) challenges this fundamental notion. JWST’s Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) analyzed 263 galaxies from the early universe and revealed a significant asymmetry: roughly 66% spin…

Penn State and Université Paris-Saclay researchers report a new way to control light by embedding “nanodots” in ultra-thin, two-dimensional (2D) materials. The team says this precision could lead to higher-resolution screens and advances in quantum computing technologies. In a study published in ACS Photonics, the scientists demonstrated how these nanodots — tiny islands of a…

The quantum computing company Alice & Bob has announced a new method for stabilizing its cat qubits. Cat qubits are a type of multi-qubit superposition that mimics the macroscopic superposition idea of Schrödinger’s cat. The company says this method can achieve up to 160 times better bit-flip error protection. The approach involves “squeezing” cat qubits…

Imagine no longer needing to stand next to a giant supercomputer to dive into quantum research. Thanks to Quantum Brilliance’s virtual Quantum Processing Unit (vQPU), you can now explore quantum computing applications from wherever you are — whether that’s a standard workstation, a remote HPC cluster, or the cloud. This advancement emulates the experience of…

A team of researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory has unveiled a new technique to predict nuclear properties with unprecedented precision. By harnessing the Frontier supercomputer, the world’s first exascale system, the scientists modeled how subatomic particles bind and shape an atomic nucleus — work that could open new frontiers in…

Microsoft has unveiled Majorana 1, a new quantum chip built on what the company calls its Topological Core architecture. Engineers say the design could lead to quantum machines with up to one million qubits, a size necessary to tackle complex problems in fields like chemistry, manufacturing, and environmental sustainability. Moving beyond conventional qubits At the…

RIKEN, Japan’s largest comprehensive research institution, has selected Quantinuum’s H1-Series ion-trap quantum computing technology for its new quantum-supercomputing hybrid platform. The collaboration will see Quantinuum install its hardware at RIKEN’s campus in Wako, Saitama, as part of a project to integrate quantum computers with high-performance computing (HPC) systems like the supercomputer Fugaku. The initiative, commissioned…

The Chinese EV giant BYD is shaking up the automotive market by breaking cost barriers in advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS). Its new “God’s Eye” technology — known technically as the DiPilot system — brings Level-2 autonomous features as standard equipment on EVs priced under $10,000. While Level 2 autonomy (SAE-defined) requires driver supervision (For context,…

High school students dove into the world of coding and artificial intelligence (AI) at the second annual Thunderbird Hackathon, held earlier this month. Sponsored by Sandia National Laboratories and Explora’s X Studio, the event challenged teams to create machine learning models predicting crime incidents using real data from Albuquerque’s open-data initiative. “At Thunderbird Hacks, we…

The global AI landscape continues to heat up: U.S. lawmakers are zeroing in on Chinese AI disruptor DeepSeek with a possible government-device ban, while open-source challenger Hugging Face fires back at proprietary tools. OpenAI is targeting education and the public sector—both in the U.S. and through a newly forged partnership with SoftBank in Japan—just as…

The Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, commonly referred to as the “Third Pole,” is undergoing significant environmental changes. Its alpine wetlands, crucial for regional biodiversity and water regulation, exhibit signs of distress, including diminishing water resources and degradation of meadows. However, persistent cloud and snow cover complicate consistent, long-term monitoring of these ecosystems. Researchers from South China Normal…

Think of the damage sophisticated cybercriminals—“hackers”—have caused in recent years. The pharmaceutical sector offers a sobering example, having weathered a steady barrage of cyberattacks over the past decade. More than ten years ago, the Dragonfly (aka “Energetic Bear”) espionage campaign targeted smaller pharma suppliers to steal intellectual property. By 2017, the NotPetya outbreak crippled Merck…

Here’s the scoop: AI is still on fire, despite bubble talk, and OpenAI’s rumored $40B capital raise—driving its valuation up to $340B—could be one of the biggest bets yet. But this isn’t happening in a vacuum. Competition from China’s DeepSeek, fresh AI model launches by Alibaba, and rumored next-gen offerings from Google and others mean…