Researchers at D-Wave have demonstrated that their Advantage2 annealing quantum computer can solve a complex real-world problem far more efficiently than the world’s most powerful classical supercomputers. The team simulated the quantum dynamics of programmable spin glasses — a type of magnetic material whose behavior is notoriously difficult to predict classically. When they ran the same computation on the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, it was estimated to take nearly a million years and consume more than the world’s annual electricity consumption. This peer-reviewed achievement marks one of the first clear cases of quantum computational supremacy on a useful, applied problem, suggesting that quantum annealers can probe quantum systems beyond the reach of classical methods.
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