STTR Phase I: A Cloud-Based Development Framework and Tool Suite for an Adiabatic Quantum Computer

这一小型企业技术转让(STTR)第一阶段项目的更广泛影响/商业潜力将是使人们能够负担得起量子退火量子计算机的访问，并消除编程和应用程序托管任务的复杂性，这目前对潜在用户构成了进入的主要障碍。该公司预计，未来几年，量子计算技术将颠覆高性能计算环境中的很大一部分优化问题，而高性能计算环境此前的特点是缓慢且渐进的性能改进。该项目将产生一个既提高效率又降低分析复杂优化问题的成本的平台，这可能会在解决此类问题的广泛经济领域刺激快节奏的创新。这些部门包括能源分配、制药设计、癌症研究、数据分析、网络安全、自主系统、规划和调度活动、风险管理和投资组合优化等金融服务，以及物理学和化学的基础和应用研究。在这些学科中的每一个领域，都有基于优化的计算问题，这些问题目前是难以解决的。这项研究的结果应该能够使更多的专家社区使用量子计算的力量来解决这些重要但目前难以解决的问题。这个小企业技术转移(STTR)第一阶段项目解决了使用量子退火计算技术的基于云的平台的需求。量子退火计算机在过去几年里已经进入市场，研究实验室和大学已经使用这些计算机来探索最终可能在它们上有效解决的算法。尽管量子退火计算机的性能有所进步，但几乎没有人致力于开发编程环境和工具，以提供简单而廉价的访问量子计算能力的途径。该项目研究具有一套前端和后端工具的平台即服务(PaaS)，该工具可将高级计算问题高效地转换为适用于量子退火法的二进制优化公式，简化和自动化目前执行有用计算所需的低级别细节和领域知识。该项目将进一步开发PaaS，以包括经典量子计算环境和框架，用于使用标准分布式计算工具分析大型数据集。这项研究探索了将新兴的量子计算能力整合到工作流程中的最佳软件工具和平台方法，方法是简化数据处理并使其负担得起，并将现实世界的问题分解为适合今天和未来量子计算机的子问题。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project will be to enable affordable access to quantum annealing quantum computers and to take the complexity out of the programming and application hosting tasks, which currently poses a major barrier of entry for potential users. The company expects quantum computing technology in the next few years to disrupt significant portions of the high-performance-computing environment for optimization problems, which has previously been characterized by slow and incremental performance improvements. This project would yield a platform that both increases the efficiency and lowers the cost of analyzing complex optimization problems, which could spur fast-paced innovation in wide areas of the economy that tackle such issues. These sectors include energy distribution, pharmaceutical design, cancer research, data analytics, cybersecurity, autonomous systems, planning and scheduling activities, financial services such as risk management and portfolio optimization, and basic and applied research in physics and chemistry. In each of these disciplines, there are optimization-based computational problems that are currently intractable. The results of this research should enable a much larger community of experts to use the power of quantum computing to solve these important but currently intractable problems.This Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I project addresses the need for a cloud-based platform for using quantum annealing computing technology. Quantum annealing computers have come to market in the last few years, and research laboratories and universities have used these machines to explore algorithms that could eventually be solved efficiently on them. Despite advances in performance of quantum annealing computers, little effort has been directed toward developing programming environments and tools that provide simple and inexpensive access to quantum computing capabilities. This project researches a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) with a suite of front-end and back-end tools that efficiently transform high-level computing problems into binary optimization formulations suitable for quantum annealing, simplifying and automating the low-level details and domain knowledge currently necessary to perform useful calculations. This project will further develop the PaaS to include a classical-quantum computing environment and framework for analysis of large data sets using standard distributed computing tools. The research explores the best software tools and platform methods to integrate emerging quantum computing capabilities into workflows by streamlining and making affordable the processing of data and by decomposing real-world problems into sub-problems amenable to quantum computers of today and in the future.