New Delhi: Last month, India joined the list of countries banking on quantum computers to solve problems that take classical computers years to do. Government of India has allotted 6,000 crore under the National Quantum Mission for the development of quantum computers, applications and communications. In an interview, Amit Singhi, Director, IBM Research, India and CTO, IBM India and South Asia, and L.K. Venkat Subramaniam reflected on the importance of the mission and India’s position in the region. , Edited excerpts:
Do you think the funds allocated under the National Quantum Mission are sufficient to compete with the likes of China and the US?
Singhi: In India, we don’t often see such steps being taken for technologies that have not matured yet. More money is always good because developing such technology on a national scale requires sustained and expanded investment. This is also an important step as the government is trying to bring ministries, research institutes and industry on board for the scientific mission.
Subramaniam: The national mission was announced in 2020 and now the budget has been allocated. But before this the government has started funding for quantum research projects. Also, the government has said that it is a seed fund to take things forward.
Do you think India’s expertise in IT and software gives it an edge in quantum application development as well?
Singhi: We have a scientific understanding of what is needed. Now it is a matter of scaling engineering. With the boom in IT services in the last two decades and the opening of global competence centers by multinational companies, software engineering skills in India are of global profile. He works with many organizations and understands what India and the world need. We need to figure out how to develop expertise on how cloud and AI can leverage quantum computing to run new applications in parallel. We hope that as the National Mission becomes more refined, it will bring these aspects to the fore.
What role do supercomputers play in quantum simulation?
Singhi: The development of supercomputing capability can really add more to what we can do. Quantum computers will not work in isolation. They need to work with classical computers to solve a problem because quantum computers will handle only part of the whole process. We need to simultaneously develop supercomputing capability or else we will get banned.
Subramaniam: The government is coming up with an exascale computing program. You can start seeing them in the top 500.
The quantum mission also talks about building a local quantum computer. why is it important?
Singhi: There are many competing technologies like superconducting which is what IBM does. Then there are trapped ions. As a country, we will choose which one we think will be the winner. Today’s quantum computers still have errors.
Subramaniam: We are in the early days of quantum computing. India probably won’t be building a quantum computer that can compete with some other countries in the next three years. Later Even if we don’t have the best quantum computer, we can build a lot around the best quantum computers as we understand how it works.
When can we see the rollout of commercial applications of quantum communication?
Singhi: We can see the quantum advantage when you start to see quantum computers outperform classical computers on specific business tasks. We’re going to start seeing quantum advantage on smaller problems very soon, probably this year or next. We are already observing these things in machine learning (ML), and chemistry, but these are not commercial applications at this point.
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