Will quantum computing make the cloud obsolete? – Raconteur

Cloud is big business – and it still has a lot of growth potential. The global market for public cloud services this year will be worth about $597 billion, according to Gartner estimates in April. The tech research giant expects the total value to soar to $725 billion in 2024 and believes this rate of expansion will be sustainable for at least the next few years. They forecast that three-quarters of organizations “will adopt a cloud-based digital transformation model as a fundamental platform” by 2026.

But what if the massive processing power of the cloud provider’s servers could easily be outpaced by the processing power of an alternative technology? Quantum computing is said to be able to perform some functions in a few microseconds that, as things stand, would take a conventional computer several millennia to process. Does that so-called quantum advantage mean that demand for classical computing could drop significantly in the next few years?

“Computing has become increasingly homogenous over the past two decades,” said Richard Hopkins, a renowned engineer specializing in hybrid cloud solutions at IBM and the company’s former senior quantum ambassador. “We will see more species because we need it. In essence, there are a lot of very powerful PCs underneath the cloud. We cannot afford to try to solve large-scale optimization problems using conventional computers like this because we would consume huge amounts of power.”

Bloomberg has estimated that the cloud could use 8% of all electricity generated in the world by the end of the decade. According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, one of the reasons for this is that nearly all possible efficiency has been removed from classical computers.

Hopkins said that IBM expects quantum computing to solve complex problems without requiring the same amount of power before 2030.

How quantum computing is developing

Quantum computing still has some significant development hurdles to overcome. For example, computers require cooling at -273°C – absolute zero – and have other demanding operating requirements. Even so, some quantum capabilities are already available. Furthermore, it is accessible through the cloud.

Simone Severini, director of quantum technology at Amazon Web Services and professor of information physics at University College London, said: “We launched Amazon Braket, a fully managed service that provides customers access to different types of quantum hardware.”

He revealed that the service is still limited in scope, but “the idea is to enable experimentation and help speed up scientific research and software development for quantum computing.”

Hopkins believes that quantum computing “will not become mainstream in the next few years, but today at IBM we have 24 quantum computing systems in our cloud. Our System Two, which can run quantum processing units alongside classical central processing units, will be released later this year.”

How quantum computing can benefit businesses

But what can quantum computers do? Hopkins explains that quantum computing applies to problems that are beyond the capabilities of algorithms that can run on classical computers. “For example, in credit card processing, we used quantum algorithms along with classical algorithms and were able to reduce the number of false positives and false negatives beyond state-of-the-art levels.”

Severini says that “some of the hardware available on Amazon Braket is universal – meaning it solves all computing problems – and some hardware is specific to specific problems.”

He emphasized that quantum computing should not be considered a panacea. There are some problems that are extremely difficult to solve for conventional systems today and will also be extremely difficult to solve for quantum computers, such as the challenges of combinatorial optimization. This is a term applied to tasks such as solving the traveling salesman problem, which involves calculating the best route for a salesperson to visit all the cities on his schedule at once. then return home. As the number of destinations increases, finding the most efficient itinerary will be computationally intensive. Combinatorial optimization has many commercial applications, such as finding the best way to cut sheets of raw material in a factory to minimize waste.

“We need to set the right expectations about quantum computing,” Severini said. “It will only be able to solve certain types of problems more effectively. Uploading data to a quantum computer can be very time-consuming, and the concept of quantum storage is still unclear. It is potentially useful when the input is small and the number of computational steps required is very large.”

He doesn’t expect quantum computing to become primarily a business service. In his view, it “will be used specifically as a research tool and have the greatest impact on fields related to quantum physics.”

However, research can include areas such as molecular interaction simulation, pricing optimization and supply chain optimization, all of which have commercial potential.

Does quantum computing pose a threat to data security?

There are security concerns about the potential misuse of quantum computing. An example of ‘small input, many steps’ is calculating the prime numbers used in a cryptographic key. With a 400-digit key, a classical computer running a million factorizations per second, over the lifetime of the universe, could try 10²⁴ ability. To be sure you can jailbreak, you need to check 10²⁰⁰ potential combination. Conversely, a quantum computer could break the long-standing RSA cryptographic standard on which the majority of online security systems today still rely.

Authorities are taking this risk seriously. For example, the US government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology announced the first four quantum-resistant encryption algorithms in 2022 after a six-year competition.

Investors are also looking for solutions to this problem. Kamil Mieczakowski, a partner at venture capital firm Notion Capital, reports that it has invested in Arqit, “a company helping businesses become ‘quantum-ready’ with proof-of-quantity encryption technology.” his death”.

Mieczakowski said it’s still early days for quantum computing and added that, once it becomes more widely available, it will likely be “overkill” for most purposes. Classic cloud computing will still be the main tool.

He commented that “building and operating quantum computers is very expensive. Their nature is also very fragile. The cloud will be the cheapest way to access quantum computing capabilities.”

In fact, quantum computers will become part of the cloud as it continues to develop and add new technology that can process data faster and be more energy efficient. But quantum computing is unlikely to dethrone the cloud as the “fundamental platform” on which future businesses will be built.