Currently, U.S. military researchers are looking to industry for innovative ways to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer with practical scale.
Recently, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) officially released a tender for the project "Untapped Practical Scale Quantum Computing System" (US2QC).
Image courtesy of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
"If there is an untapped field in quantum computing that can show a faster development prospect than we expected, we hope to explore it immediately and thoroughly verify the feasibility of the method." Joe Altepeter, program director at THE US2QC program at DARPA's Office of Defense Science, said.
The US2QC project will focus on evaluating the feasibility of a practical scale quantum computing approach, and its initial phase (Phase 0) will allow participants to demonstrate the design concepts of the quantum computer they are planning. The research proposed by the participants should be revolutionary in the design, engineering, testing, and evaluation of utility-scale quantum computing systems, with a particular exclusion of research that builds on existing practices.
"There's no validation scheme that can work with all the different quantum computing methods," Altepeter says, "which means we don't know what the next phase [of the project] will look like or how long it will last." Identifying key milestones is unique to each project, depending on the validation of Phase 0 and its progress. If the proposed concept proves to be reasonable, Phase 0 could be very short. As the team reaches the milestones of the subsequent phases that are unique to their approach, we will continue to scale up the work. ”
Example phase of project work, picture from tender attachments
The project tender demonstrates an example phase of work beyond Phase 0. In Example Phase 1, the performer will design a fault-tolerant prototype, identify all required components and subsystems, and establish minimum performance requirements. Example Phase 2 requires participants and governments to work together to verify that all components and subsystems meet the target performance specifications for a utility-scale quantum computer.