As IBM achieves modular quantum cold chain milestone, is it time to think about ‘cold swapping’?
IBM recently joined two cryogenic modules and cooled them together as one environment. This represents an important milestone in building scalable and maintainable fault-tolerant superconducting quantum systems. The big deal is that it shows a path toward building modular quantum computers that can be connected and, eventually, cold-swapped much like existing data centers. It’s still early days, given all the other pieces that will need to come together, but it shows reasonable progress toward credible quantum computing systems.
This work is a bet on scaling the superconducting variant of quantum computers, which will likely be hundreds to thousands of times faster at executing its basic operations than competing approaches based on trapped ions or neutral atoms. But superconducting systems also come with immense challenges in cooling things to extremely cold temperatures compared to these alternatives and doing so at scale. IBM’s processors run at about fifteen millikelvin, fifteen thousandths of...
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