Wave Systems Announces Agreement to Provide Technology to Google, NASA, and USRA

Some companies need a few computers to go about their business, others need very fast mainframes and servers to function.

Google and NASA have not yet found a use for quantum computers but are confident that in the future there will be an application that will justify the costs and talent required to research this new form of computing.

Google and NASA have been working with a quantum computing system created by D-Wave at the NASA Ames Research Center over the last two years.

Google (GOOGL – Get Report), along with NASA and Universities Space Research Association (USRA), reached a new agreement with quantum computing company D-Wave Systems to get a new quantum computer.

“Working with the D-Wave processors has helped us develop and fine-tune models of quantum annealing”, said Hartmut Neven, Google’s head of the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, The Verge reports.

Quantum computers will use qubits, or quantum bits, which rely on laws of quantum mechanics to achieve various states.

The major challenge for Qubits is that it requires an operating temperature below 15 millikelvin, near absolute Zero temperature, to work.

This pioneering project focuses on leveraging quantum computing to boost artificial intelligence, machine learning and to help tackle hard optimization problems for both the web and the space company.

NASA’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL) is the space agency’s hub for an experiment to assess the potential of quantum computers to perform calculations that are hard or impossible using conventional supercomputers. “We look forward to the continued advances coming from each generation of D-Wave systems”. Also part of the study was physicist John Martinis, who was hired by Google two months later for the Quantum AI Lab. D-Wave disputed this claim, but there hasn’t been much more meaningful testing of the technology since. D-Wave said this search space “contains far more possibilities than there are ‪particles in the observable universe”.

While it is unclear which technology will prevail, what is certain is that Google will have its first pick once the final results are in.

D-Wave mentioned in a press release that the order was the biggest in its historical past, and an important in getting the little-understood know-how off the bottom.