Google claims to beat IBM to create world's most powerful computer

NASA published a Google report on the creation of the world's most powerful quantum computer, writes the Financial Times, citing a document that was soon removed from the agency's website. It said that the new quantum processor calculated in 3 minutes 20 seconds, which is 1.6 billion times faster than the Summit supercomputer manufactured by the American company IBM (it would take 10 thousand years for this). Summit has been the most powerful computer so far.

Supercomputer. The Google report said that IBM's Summit supercomputer for 10 thousand years (2.25 billion minutes) performs a calculation that took Google's machine 3.2 minutes. This difference was called “quantum superiority in computing tasks” in the report.

Opposition between IBM and Google. A full-fledged universal quantum computer has not yet been created. Several companies are involved in its development, the leading ones are Google and IBM.

• In October, IBM planned to launch a 53 qubit computer and called it the most powerful in the world. IBM promised to give researchers and businesses remote access to the machine.
• The Google post was about a 72 qubit computer, writes the FT.
• Earlier, in July 2018, Google signed a contract with NASA to jointly develop and test the Bristlecone quantum computer.
• Rigetti Computing and several other companies are also developing a prototype of a quantum supercomputer.
• at Moscow State University Russian scientists are also working on the creation of such a supercomputer, for example, a quantum supercomputer with a capacity of 50 qubits is being developed .
• The Summit computer that Google compared the performance of its invention to is not quantum. Its capacity is 200 thousand trillion operations per second, the computer consists of 4608 computing servers. IBM created Summit in 2018 with two of its 22-core Power9 processors per server. Summit's capabilities can be used, in particular, for research in the field of nuclear weapons.

What is a quantum computer. Quantum computers use the phenomena of quantum mechanics to transfer data. If a conventional computer uses bits (one or zero), then a quantum computer uses qubits (combined values).

• Quantum computers should help in the areas of artificial intelligence and machine learning, in the chemical industry, logistics, industry, energy and finance, the Boston Consulting Group said in a report last year.
• But so far, quantum computers are doing only one calculation at a time, albeit very quickly. Years may pass before the start of their practical application.