Public Funding for Oxford Quantum Circuits Limited

Large language models such as ChatGPT have recently undergone a step-change in their user-perceived efficacy, and as such they have caught the attention of journalists and then the imagination of the general public. These A.I. systems appear to deliver responses to user-posed questions that are both informative and delivered with substantial expertise. The application of this nascent, yet extraordinarily useful, technical breakthrough across whole ranges of industries is only starting to become apparent. Large language models are effective since they capture and codify, in their models, significant portions of all human knowledge, through the process of ingesting the entirety of the World-Wide-Web. The resultant models are staggeringly large (for example, ChatGPT3 contains some 175 billion parameters) and thus, these models take months to train and use a great deal of power to run. It is our intention to build a Chat-GPT like large language model A.I. system that utilises a quantum calculation engine. The system shall employ a fundamentally different processing, model and systems architecture to current systems, leading to a step change in the efficiency and power of the resultant system. We shall build software to run such a system and demonstrate its increased efficiency in both training models, which shall be much more energy efficient during the training process, and in speed of execution and energy use when in operation. These benchmarks shall be performed against the requirements of the NLP and voice processing industry as understood by the consortium.

Advanced production capabilities have allowed conventional electronics based on semiconductors to become more powerful and support almost all technologies we use today, from laptops to washing machines and cutting edge medical equipment. But semiconductors are now facing hard limits as the miniaturisation of components reaches closer to the atomic scale. The limitations of these classical circuits can be overcome with quantum circuits, which utilise all the tricks of nature to open up areas in sensing, security and information processing technology that previously remained elusive. One of the most successful ways of building these quantum circuits is with superconductors, which can be built with many of the tools already used for conventional electronics and allow for a large degree of customisation to be applied to almost any area within quantum technology. Building these superconducting circuits is currently a challenging feat, requiring close to atomic level accuracy of circuit writing and total isolation from any radiation, contamination and defects that would otherwise disturb the delicate quantum state of these circuits. Furthemore, accessing cryogenic equipment and state-of-the-art electronics for verification also presents a significant up-front investment. The capacity to produce these circuits is therefore confined to academic and national labs, and a very small number of secretive commercial ventures. Whilst there are many potential business opportunities ready to be exploited in this space, the superconducting circuits' production challenges present a large barrier to entry to most companies in the UK. They simply do not have the resources available to catch-up and compete with commercially available solutions. Fortunately, the UK is home to world-leading experts in the manufacture and validation of high quality superconducting circuits, and to world-class commercial partners across the whole supply chain from production to integration and measurement. Together we are bringing the capability to produce superconducting circuits at commercial scale and quality, for a nascent quantum economy that is about to rapidly expand. To provide lower barriers to entry and empower UK-based ventures, we will develop R&D centres for businesses, as well as foundries for the purchase of superconducting devices and access to testing equipment. This unique extra capability will empower the UK as a hub for technology based on superconducting circuits, bringing in jobs and investment, and delivering a domestic supply of a technology with many strategic benefits.

Without an operating system, computers would be much less useful. Before the invention of operating systems, computers could only run one calculation at a time. All tasks had to be scheduled by hand. Operating systems automate the scheduling of tasks and make sure that resources such as memory and disk space are allocated properly. Because operating systems simplify computers, everyone can handle them and benefit from them. Quantum computers are a new type of powerful computer. Big and high-quality quantum computers can outperform conventional computers at specific tasks, such as predicting the properties of a drug. Currently, it is difficult for users to interact with quantum computers because there is no good operating system. The systems that exist don't schedule tasks optimally and cannot perform calculations quickly. Building this operating system is difficult -- many have tried and no solutions have worked. We have invented an operating system to overcome this technical challenge: NISQ.OS. While competitors present quantum computers as a "black box", NISQ.OS exposes all its different elements. Many of them look far more familiar than you might think. Quantum computers consist of a quantum processing unit, which contains the qubits, a couple of layers of special-purpose chips that control the qubits, and a conventional computer for overall control. By providing access to all these layers of the "quantum computing stack", we give the user the power to schedule tasks in an optimal way. This will improve the performance of quantum computers by a 1,000-fold compared to other leading approaches. Once we integrate hardware and software tightly, we expect that the performance will improve by 1,000,000-fold. We have assembled a group of experts from across the UK to build the operating system. This includes the UK's leading quantum hardware companies, Hitachi, Oxford Quantum Circuits, SeeQC, Duality Quantum Photonics, Oxford Ionics, and Universal Quantum; Riverlane, a quantum software company; Arm, a UK-based chip manufacturer; and the National Physical Laboratory. The National Physical Laboratory plays an important role because their expertise lies in developing technical standards for breakthrough technology. To build our operating system, we need to define a new standard interface between software and hardware that everyone can use. Our project will attract many important customers, such as pharmaceutical or chemical companies, as well as the financial industry. Because our operating system is so much better, they will want to run their applications on UK-based quantum computers.

Oxford Quantum Circuits Limited (OQC), established in June 2017, are developing quantum computing processors based on superconducting circuits. A fundamental business question for OQC is what applications (quantum algorithms) are best suited for its technology, and how to most efficiently realise first generation processors that will be capable of running these applications, and hence generate sales. This project addresses this challenge from two angles; development by Cambridge Quantum Computing Limited (CQC) of a quantum compiler dedicated to the OQC hardware architecture, and prototype development and assessment of circuit layouts with differing connectivity maps. These two directions will be combined with assessment of mapping of quantum algorithms onto the OQC architecture to produce clear direction for OQC R&D in the next phase of its development.