“Quantum I think is amongst many things that we see as emerging areas when it comes to frontiers of technology. India and the Indian ecosystem must be a part of this collaborative model,” Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrashekhar said Wednesday while virtually addressing industry experts and stakeholders in the tech ecosystem at IBM’s annual Think conference in Mumbai.
“Quantum is a very important piece of it and is clearly something that cannot be ignored,” he stressed adding that “we intend to build capabilities in quantum and high-performance computing.” At a day-long event, IBM released a white paper, titled “Building an Indian Quantum Industry”, which was unveiled by Chandrashekhar. The white paper is a part of an effort to create the quantum computing ecosystem in India.
Recent years have seen a surge in “quantum” computing to build super-fast computers. Quantum computers are based on qubits, a unit that can hold more data than classic binary bits. Experts say such machines could revolutionise computing, taking advantage of quantum physics to solve problems that “classical” computers cannot.
In 2019, Google announced that it had reached something called “quantum supremacy” when it published an article in the journal Nature. The Software giant said that its 54-qubit Sycamore processor was able to perform a calculation in 200 seconds that would have taken the world’s most powerful supercomputer 10,000 years.
At that time, scientists from IBM – a key quantum computer competitor- disputed Google’s claims. IBM said that the same task could be performed on a classical system in just 2.5 days, rather than 10,000 years as Google was claiming.
Earlier this year, IBM said it plans to introduce a 4,000+ qubit quantum computer by 2025. That progress will move beyond the experimental phase by 2025, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna told reporters. In 2020, IBM said it would deliver a 1,121-qubit device in 2023.
The US and China lead in quantum computing innovation. In the US, the private sector’s contribution is the key to thriving quantum computing research and development, headlined by big tech companies like Google, IBM and Microsoft. The US is also home to over 78 quantum computing startups, according to Tracxn, a website that tracks companies by industry. China, India’s neighbouring country, is getting ahead in the quantum computing supremacy game.
IBM recently partnered with the Indian Institute of Technology Madras to advance quantum computing skill development and research in India. With this partnership, IIT Madras joins over 180 members of the IBM Quantum Network globally.
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