IBM Quantum on the Cloud: your Circuit Power Plant

A quantum circuit is the basic unit of work for a quantum computing system

By Bob Sutor, Vice President, IBM Quantum Ecosystem Development, IBM Research

IBM Quantum hosts more quantum computers on the cloud than anyone else on the planet as well as the most robust and complete quantum software framework. To date, we’ve deployed 18 quantum computing systems on the IBM Cloud serving over 225,000 registered users. What does this mean for people who want to draw on this extraordinary capacity today? What will it mean in the future as our systems become more powerful and more numerous? Let’s first look at an analogy with an electrical power plant.

Suppose you are a business and you are planning to build a new factory. There are many considerations and risk assessments that go into this. Let’s think about the necessary electricity to power the factory. You have identified two target locations where you might set up your new manufacturing.

The first town you visit looks promising and you meet the mayor at the proposed site. The mayor talks about the wonderful area, the local workforce, and economic factors. Then you ask “Can you supply enough power to serve my initial needs as well as those as I expand and produce new products?” After muttering some words, the mayor points to an electrical generator that was bought at a home improvement store. Shocked, you say “You expect me to base the future of my business on that?”. You abruptly end the meeting and leave.

The next day you go to the second candidate town. Pretty much everything seems similar regarding the financials and the workforce, and then you ask this town’s mayor the same question about the power capacity. The mayor responds “We’ve thought long and hard about what it takes to provide the capacity you and others need. We’re ready to meet all your needs on Day One and we can grow sustainably to handle whatever expansion you might consider. We’re your partner in making your business a success from your early tests through full commercial production.”

Not surprisingly, you decide to go with the second location and its substantial and expandable power generation.

You need to make the same choice regarding your cloud quantum computing provider. IBM Quantum on the IBM Cloud is like the second town above: we can provide the computing power you need today and will grow as we innovate together. We have a single goal: help you use quantum computing to solve problems that are intractable with today’s classical systems alone. IBM Quantum is your cloud quantum power plant.

To complete this analogy, we need to introduce a single word to help you know how we measure quantum computing capacity: circuit.

Right away, this seems technical and engineering-like. However, you have probably heard of at least one of

• circuit board,
• electrical circuit,
• circuit breaker, or
• circuit box.

So the term is not completely out of common use.

Another technical term, and this goes back to our electrical power plant example, is watt. You may have bought a 9W (nine watt) LED light bulb. A quick scan of hair dryers on an online shopping site brings up many 1875W models. What is a watt? In the metric system, a watt is one joule per second, where a joule is a unit of work or energy. You don’t need to know about joules or watts to buy light bulbs or hair dryers, but you know that more gives you a brighter bulb or a hotter, stronger dryer.

And so it is with “circuit.” A quantum circuit is the basic unit of work for a quantum computing system. If I have an app or software on a phone or laptop and it needs to call out to an IBM Quantum system to perform a calculation, it sends the circuit information over and the circuit is executed, possibly multiple times.

The output of an electrical power plant is measured in megawatts (MW), where a MW is one million watts. The Belo Monte power station in Brazil generates 11,233 MW, the Grand Coulee Dam in the US produces 6,809 MW, and the Hanbit facility in South Korea generates 5,875 MW. [Wikipedia] For entire countries, we use gigawatts (GW), or billions of watts.

On a typical day in April, 2020, users of IBM Quantum systems on the IBM Cloud ran over 500 million circuits. On some days, that number approached 1 billion. Put another way, that’s 500 MC (megacircuits) or 0.5 GC (gigacircuits). These are huge numbers and it shows that rather than being at the very start of the quantum computing age, we are well into it. In fact, May 4 is the fourth anniversary of IBM putting its first quantum computer on the cloud.

Ready to get some hands-on experience yourself with quantum circuits on the cloud? Join us for the IBM Quantum Challenge, running from May 4 through 8, 2020. Through four levels, you’ll learn the basics of quantum computing, explore the “noise” in real quantum hardware, discover how quantum cryptography started, and see how close you can come to the right answer in an optimization puzzle.

Circuits should be the standard way of discussing how much work installations of quantum systems can perform. In the case of IBM now and, I hope, others in the future, they tell you whether you can put quantum computers to work for you. In the electrical analogy, we’ve innovated through the decades to create appliances and machines that did things we once never imagined. The same will be true with quantum, and IBM Quantum will be there with you and for you.

A few technical points

• Just as a watt has a technical meaning in terms of joules, a circuit is defined by qubits (quantum bits), gates, and operations. These are described in the online Qiskit Textbook as well as my book Dancing with Qubits.
• You can run circuits on real IBM Quantum hardware through the IBM Quantum Experience. Simply sign up and start using the drag-and-drop Composer or follow examples in Qiskit Jupyter notebooks.
• Quantum Volume is a lower level metric that tells you how well a particular quantum computing system can perform.
• It’s not enough to simply say you have a quantum computer on the cloud. IBM Quantum on the IBM Cloud includes visualizations, job management, results management, debuggers, and advanced functions such as compilers, simulators, and schedulers.