
Rigetti Computing (YC S14) Raises $2.5M to Create Commercial Quantum Systems - paul
http://techcrunch.com/2014/08/11/yc-backed-rigetti-computing-raises-2-5m-to-create-commercial-quantum-systems/
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crigetti
@FiatLuxDave - Great questions, thank you! We are building quantum computing
systems. We have a simulation-driven development process for the hardware,
both the quantum and classical parts of the system, and that helps us keep
costs down.

For challenge problems, that's a great idea. We're focused on applications to
computational chemistry and machine learning, among others, right now.

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crigetti
Hi everyone! I'm Chad Rigetti, the founder of Rigetti Computing. I'd love to
answer any questions you may have. Chad

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orgiazzi
Great to hear that there is space in this industry for new companies beyond
BBN, IBM and Northrop Grunman!

Have you already applied for funding with Quantum Valley Investments
([http://quantumvalleyinvestments.com](http://quantumvalleyinvestments.com))?
If not you should do so! The funding is not restricted to Canadian or Waterloo
Ontario based research, as far as I know.

Are you gonna run HFSS/Comsol/ADS/Qutip... on Amazon EC2, scalable at will, or
are you going to invest in your own parallel computing hardware? I can imagine
a big chunk of this initial funding is going to go into buying a couple HPC
pack licenses...

Best of luck!

Jean-Luc Orgiazzi

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crigetti
Hi Jean-Luc, Thank you for the kind wishes. Those are some great questions! We
are definitely running HFSS, and we've made some small investments in
traditional HPC hardware. Our primary use case thus far has been Eigenmode
solver, which doesn't parallelize well. We're figuring out how use Driven
solver a little more - the HPC packs provides a real boost in that case. We're
excited to be expanding the eco-system of companies doing groundbreaking QC
work beyond the standard list of big defense contractors :)

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madengr
I assume you are simulating resonators for ion traps with the eigenmode
solver? I had quicker results optimizing with time-domain analysis (CST
Microwave Studio), then switching to eigenmode to find the Q, than using
frequency domain solver. The time-domain solver is easily spread across
multiple GPU.

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crigetti
Hi madengr - Thanks for the comment. We're focused on solid-state qubits right
now, not ion traps. Are you building your own GPU-based hardware for your
simulations?

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madengr
Nope, my workstation is a pre-built Tesla Whisper-station from Microway with
two Nvidia K20. Also have a 4 node HP blade cluster dedicated for CST and
Microwave Office (Axiem), with last generation Tesla GPUs. That 4 node cluster
is expanded up to 32 nodes by convincing coworkers to install CST distributing
computing solver server. That works really well for parametric sweeps and
solvers that can't use GPU. It's sort of a cobbled together system, but it
works well.

To what sort of problems are you employing eigenmode analysis, or just 3D EM
in general?

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levlandau
@crigetti details are sparse both in the article and on your website. Quantum
Computing is a pretty dear topic to me and so it'd be great to hear some more
high level details on what it is Rigetti does. Merci Beaucoup.

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crigetti
Hi Lev - Our mission is to deliver fault-tolerant quantum computing systems
and services to the commercial market. We're currently prototyping our
technology at the small scale i.e. < 20 qubits. Once this validation is
complete, we intend to scale up to much larger systems.

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dtmcclure
Chad, Sounds interesting! Is the 20-qubit threshold set by limitations of your
simulation tools, or is that really all you need to validate your approach and
ensure that nothing weird will happen (crosstalk / correlated errors / etc.)
when you scale up to larger numbers of qubits?

Good luck! Doug

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crigetti
Hey Doug! Thanks! Great to see the IBM quantum team on HackerNews! We've
worked really hard to bake scalability into the designs from day 1. Our
challenge now is to validate standard 1 and 2 qubit performance metrics on
that scalable 2-D qubit lattice. A system with ~16 qubits is big enough to get
a reasonable assessment of correlated errors between non-nearest neighbors,
and small enough that it's still pretty cheap to build. We've also made some
great headway in developing a scalable and low-cost architecture for the
control electronics and signal delivery - about 20x cheaper than the standard
approaches - and 16 qubits is large enough to really put those to the test. Be
well! Chad

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technotony
Really excited about the potential of systems like this for simulating
biological processes. Imagine being able to simulate the design of biological
parts on a computer rather than having to test in-vivo - making development
faster and cheaper. This will transform the field of synthetic biology.

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saryn
Are you building on D-Wave Systems computers, or building your own?

If your own, what architecture?

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crigetti
Hi saryn - we're building gate-based systems and working towards quantum error
correction. We've developed our own physical architecture for the processor
that we believe is highly scalable and much cheaper than other approaches.

