Two engineers work on one of Qilimanjaro’s quantum computers
Qilimanjaro
Quantum computers once seemed like fanciful machines of the future. Now, a DIY kit means that anyone with enough money and engineering skills can have one of their own.
Barcelona-based quantum computing company Qilimanjaro created EduQit by taking a “flatpack furniture” approach – gathering all the parts and giving customers the job of putting them together.
EduQit includes a chip made from tiny superconducting circuits, which is the heart of the quantum computer. There is also a special refrigerator that the chip is installed and wired into, along with a set of electronic devices that use radio waves and microwaves for controlling the chip and reading the results of its computations. All of this is combined with a smattering of racks, power cables and other devices that help complete the quantum computer.
Putting it all together isn’t a trivial task, but EduQit does come with instructions. Marta Estarellas at Qilimanjaro says the team offers training from its researchers and support throughout the building process. The training would take up to three months, she says, with the whole system being ready to run after at least 10 months of work.
The EduQit quantum computer comes with five qubits, which makes it less than a tenth of the size of cutting-edge devices, but it also only costs around €1 million, making it much cheaper. Most quantum computers are currently built by either tech giants or particularly well-funded start-ups and research institutions. For comparison, Google has said that it aims to bring its component costs down by a factor of 10 to bring the price of a single machine below $1 billion.
A Qilimanjaro quantum chip
Qilimanjaro
Smaller-scale commercial machines are already for sale, but don’t come as a complete kit. For example, California-based company Rigetti sells a small superconducting quantum computer for research and development starting at about $900,000 for just the main chip and a few small components, roughly analogous to buying only the motherboard of a classical computer but not the monitor or the keyboard. Any research team that acquires one would have to buy the rest of the components by themselves.
Qilimanjaro is aiming the kit at the many research institutions where a lack of resources puts quantum computing technology out of reach. The firm is particularly focused on how it could give the next generation of researchers direct experience of building and running it.
Students can currently access quantum computers through the cloud or by working with computer simulations of quantum systems, but EduQit will allow them to develop more hands-on skills, says Estrellas. In this way, EduQit could become a quantum equivalent of a Raspberry Pi, a small and easy-to-modify computer that started as an education tool, but became broadly used among tinkerers and scientists.
Quantum computers promise to tackle calculations that are intractable even for the world’s best supercomputers, ranging from breaking the encryption that secures the internet to simulating the behaviour of molecules to discover new drugs. However, the chips are fragile and prone to errors. Building quantum computers that can realise this potential hinges on finding better ways to protect and control them.
A quantum computer comparable to EduQit would have been competitive with the most advanced devices available in some of the most sophisticated labs around a decade ago. The fact that it can be sold as a DIY kit shows how much quantum computing has advanced in the intervening years.
Katia Moskovitch at the firm Quantum Machines says there are many open questions for the future of quantum computing and the more people get a chance to play with them, the more likely it is that answers will be found.
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