Today D-Wave Systems announced the immediate availability of Leap 2, the first quantum cloud service designed for developers and organizations to easily build and deploy real-world hybrid quantum applications with practical impact. In addition to live, real-time access to the D-Wave quantum system, the offering expands the Quantum Application Environment (QAE) to provide new tools and resources needed to drive development of critical business applications and put them into production.
With Leap, we opened the door to real-time quantum access. With Leap 2, we’re giving developers and businesses the key to business applications. By delivering a hybrid offering, we’re removing many of the barriers related to complexity and problem size,” said Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave. “Developers and enterprise leaders need the tools and support to turn their ideas and innovations into quantum applications that have a real impact on their business. You can’t capture new revenue or solve the most difficult problems facing your industry if you don’t have the ability to quickly ideate, build, and deploy quantum applications. Leap 2 bridges that gap for the first time.”
Built on insights from thousands of users, many of them developers, and from the past 18 months of usage of the Leap quantum cloud service, Leap 2 includes:
- Hybrid solver service: The hybrid solver service is a managed cloud-based service allowing users to easily solve large and complex problems of up to 10,000 variables. The hybrid solver automatically runs problems on a collection of quantum and classical cloud resources, using D-Wave’s advanced algorithms to decide the best way to solve a problem.
- Integrated Developer Environment (IDE): The IDE is a prebuilt, ready-to-code environment in the cloud for quantum hybrid Python development. The Leap IDE has the latest Ocean SDK set up and configured, and includes the new D-Wave problem inspector and Python debugging tools. Seamless GitHub integration means that developers can easily access the latest examples and contribute to the Ocean tools from within the IDE.
- Problem inspector: The problem inspector allows more advanced quantum developers to visually see how their problems map onto the quantum processing unit (QPU). By showing the logical and embedded structure of a problem, the inspector displays the solutions returned from the QPU and provides alerts that allow developers to improve their results.
- Flexible access: New to Leap 2 are hybrid offerings with price plans for all skill and investment levels, allowing access to even more flexible increments of computing time across quantum and classical systems. Users will continue to benefit from both paid and free, real-time access to a D-Wave 2000Q quantum computer to submit and run applications.
Leap 2 is a natural progression for D-Wave, building on the company’s continuing work to drive practical, real-world quantum application development. D-Wave was the first company to sell commercial quantum computers, the first to give developers real-time access to live quantum processers, and the only provider with customers building applications at this scale and seeing early signs of business value as a result. In the year since launching Leap, the number of customer applications built using D-Wave’s systems has grown from 80 to more than 200 across a diverse application landscape, including protein folding, financial modeling, machine learning, materials science, and logistics. This impact was recognized today as D-Wave and quantum computing were featured in the MIT Tech Review’s Top 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2020.
At the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Biology and Menten AI, we are using D-Wave’s hybrid quantum-classical approach to solve an extremely complex computational task: creating new proteins not found in nature,” said Dr. Vikram Mulligan, Flatiron Institute Research Scientist and Co-founder of Menten AI. “Accessing D-Wave through Leap 2 helps us to solve much larger problems in a fast and efficient manner, and allows us to not only design these molecules today, but also reimagine tomorrow’s therapeutics.”
D-Wave’s forthcoming Advantage system will be available via Leap 2 this year. The combination of Advantage’s computing power and Leap 2’s quantum cloud access, hybrid solver and easy-to-use QAE will further expand hybrid quantum applications with real business value.
