Aliro Technologies, Inc. — Department of Defense STTR Phase I: AF21A-TCSO1

Description

Quantum computing will drive massive improvements in the world economy and the human condition. Pharmaceutical companies will be able to accelerate the discovery of new drugs. Materials companies will be able to achieve breakthroughs in battery and energy conversion technology. Transportation companies and Militaries will be able to streamline logistics for energy efficiency. All large organizations in both public and private sectors will be able to more effectively leverage machine learning and artificial intelligence to dramatically improve their technology and operations.  Engineers and researchers are ready to embrace the power of quantum in their high performance computing environments, but the current generation of quantum computing hardware has too many limitations that are obscuring its revolutionary potential.  One major limitation is the number of qubits in a single system. In superconducting systems, Google is now at ~50 qubits, IBM and Rigetti are at about 100.  In trapped ion systems, which have attractive properties such as higher fidelity and longer coherence times, the number of qubits is even less, ranging from 6 to 32. In contrast, useful quantum computing applications such as large optimizations, or advanced machine learning require 1000s of qubits.   One solution is to network several smaller quantum computers into a cluster, just as classical computers were networked decades ago using LAN technologies. Quantum computer clustering can unlock quantum computing at scale. It can also drive down the cost of quantum computing, as smaller, simpler quantum computers networked together can provide the same processing power as very large systems, which are expensive and difficult to build and operate.  In addition, if different types of quantum computers can be networked, for example superconducting systems with trapped ion systems, the advantageous properties of each can be applied to the application at hand.