We are D-Wave Systems, Inc. The Quantum Computing Company

D-Wave Systems ^ | 02/07 | D-Wave

[theFIRMbss]

We are D-Wave Systems, Inc. The Quantum Computing Company. D-Wave is the world’s first — and only — provider of quantum computing systems designed to run commercial applications.

Please join us in February as we demonstrate a technological first: an end-to-end quantum computing system powered by a 16-qubit quantum processor, running two commercial applications — live.

For your convenience, we will host this event in two locations: Silicon Valley and, two days later, in Vancouver, B.C. near our home offices. We look forward to seeing you.

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BOARD

Haig Farris, LL.D., Chairman

Dr. Farris is one of Canada's most well known venture capitalists and experts in high-technology start-ups and turn-arounds, with a varied 30+ year history of involvement, commitment and management. A co-founder of D-Wave, he is the President of Fractal Capital Corp, a private venture capital company financing high technology start-ups and resource service technology companies.

Previously Dr. Farris was a co-founder and partner of the Ventures West Management group of venture capital funds (1972 - 1990), which continues to be the largest venture capital pool in Western Canada. In 2001, he received the British Columbia Technologies Industry Association's (BCTIA) Bill Thompson Award.

Herb Martin, Chief Executive Officer

Mr. Martin has twenty years experience as a chief executive of high technology companies. Starting his career as an electrical engineer, Herb progressed through executive positions in engineering, sales and marketing before undertaking his first position as chief executive of Mercator, a microcomputer company he founded. After merging Mercator with Onyx Systems, a publicly traded company, Mr. Martin ran the European operations of the combined entity before becoming the Onyx President and Chief Operating officer in San Jose, California. He was subsequently the President and Chief Operating officer of Wollongong Group where he led the company’s growth to become a leading internet software company providing products and services to major companies globally.

Subsequent to merging Wollongong with the Attachmate Corporation, Mr. Martin, who was then a director of ESS Technology, a publicly traded semiconductor company, became its President and Chief Operating officer. During his tenure at ESS, the company’s market capitalization increased by almost a billion dollars. Mr. Martin led the founding and growth of Salira Optical Network Systems, an optical networking company specializing in the provision of broadband services. Salira was eventually sold to Hitachi Communications Technologies, Ltd. and Hitachi, Ltd., after building a successful product line and customer base.

Mr. Martin brings to D-Wave extensive experience in growing companies to substantial revenues, developing profitable business models and building global channels and business partnerships.

Dr. Geordie Rose, Founder and Chief Technology Officer

Dr. Rose is a founder and CTO of D-Wave. He is known as a leading advocate for quantum computing and physics-based processor design, and has been invited to speak on these topics in venues ranging from the 2003 TED conference to Supercomputing 2005.

His innovative and ambitious approach to building quantum computing technology has received coverage in BC Business, The Vancouver Sun, Vancouver magazine, The Globe and Mail, The National Post, USA Today, MIT Technology Review magazine, the Harvard Business Review and Business 2.0 magazine, and one of his business strategies was profiled in a Harvard Business School case study. He has received several awards and accolades for his work with D-Wave, including being short-listed for a 2005 World Technology Award.

Dr. Rose holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of British Columbia, specializing in quantum effects in materials. While at McMaster University, he graduated first in his class with a B.Eng. in Engineering Physics specializing in semiconductor engineering.

Since the inception of D-Wave in 1999, as founding CEO Dr. Rose raised over $45M on behalf of the company, including a round led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ), the first ever investment by a top-tier US venture capital firm in quantum computing.

Jeremy P. Hilton, Vice President, Technology

Mr. Hilton was previously Director of Intellectual Property and was responsible for managing the transfer of intellectual property from D-Wave's global collaborative network to Vancouver. In under three years, he grew D-Wave's Intellectual Property portfolio from 13 to 126 patents filed. Mr. Hilton has accepted several awards on behalf of D-Wave, including the 2003 British Columbia Technology Industry Association (BCTIA) award for "Most Promising Pre-Commercial Technology". He is a member of the Langara College Computer Science Program Advisory Committee and the BCTIA Research & Development Committee.

Dr. William Macready, Vice President, Product Development

Dr. Macready joined D-Wave from NASA's Ames Research Center where he was a Senior Research Scientist. At NASA, Dr. Macready nucleated a group in Machine Learning, and built intelligent algorithms for high performance scheduling, the automated design of satellite antennae, and learning algorithms for the automated extraction of knowledge from NASA satellite and deep space imagery.

Prior to joining NASA, Dr. Macready was Vice-President of Science and Research for Prowess Software and was responsible for the design and prototyping of a multi-dimensional matching engine for electronic marketplaces. Before that, he was Vice-President of Science, for BiosGroup, a Cap Gemini Ernst and Young funded consulting company applying complexity science advances to solving complex business problems. Dr. Macready has managed the delivery of numerous projects to Fortune 500 customers.

Dr. Macready holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from the University of Toronto and has over 30 peer reviewed publications in physics, machine learning, optimization, economics, and theoretical biology journals. Articles discussing the implications of his some of his work have appeared in “New Scientist” and “The New Yorker” magazines.

David Gillard, CGA, Vice President, Finance

Mr. Gillard brings over 15 years of financial experience to D-Wave, including 5 years with Stockgroup Media Inc., a publicly traded startup company that matured into a profitable enterprise while he was CFO. Prior to Stockgroup, he was a financial manager at Maynards Industries Ltd., a large asset sales organization. Mr. Gillard is a graduate of the British Columbia Institute of Technology and received his CGA designation in 1996.

Mr. Gillard’s community involvement includes a role as financial advisor to the Alzheimer Society of B.C., and he has participated in a well-known fund-raiser for the Society called the Ascent for Alzheimers.

Tanya J. Rothe, General Counsel & Director of Intellectual Property

Ms. Rothe holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Chemical Engineering - Chemistry Honours and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of British Columbia. Following law school, Tanya was selected to clerk for Madam Justice McLachlin of the Supreme Court of Canada (now Chief Justice of Canada), and subsequently worked as an associate at Bull, Housser & Tupper, where she specialized in engineering and complex commercial litigation.

Prior to joining D-Wave, Tanya worked as Intellectual Property Counsel at Ballard Power Systems Inc., where she was responsible for managing a significant portion of Ballard's intellectual property portfolio, including all of the intellectual property developed by Ballard's US materials and electric drive and power conversion divisions. In 2003, Ms. Rothe obtained her designation as a registered patent agent.

[theFIRMbss]

>I follow the "computer world" and it's not "big news"

I still remember
the preliminary buzz
about the face off

Kendall Square Research
and the Connections Machine
were going to have.

That came to nothing.
(Well, some cool court proceedings . . .)
But this is big news

in embryo and
it could signal a shift in
CPU design.

We must wait and see
how it plays out. But Freepers
now have a heads up.

[theFIRMbss]

>The loops then spontaneously flip until they reach a stable energy state, which represents the solution to the problem. ...
>>Is it just me, or does this sound suspiciously like the Improbability Drive?

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"When Joseph Plateau published his treatise on soap bubbles and film in 1873, soap bubbles already had their own place in literature and art. Plateau's problem consists in taking a generic curve in three-space and finding a surface with the least possible area bounded by that curve. The empirical solution may be obtained by dipping a tridimensional model of the curve into soapy water, resulting in a form called a minimal surface. When a soap bubble is blown, the soapy surface stretches; when blowing ceases, the film tends toward equilibrium. The sphere presents the least exterior surface area of all surfaces containing the same volume of air."

Architecture and Mathematics: Soap Bubbles and Soap Films, Michele Emmer, Professor of Mathematics Università di Roma
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Quantum state effects
are no different from other
cool tricks of nature.

Why shouldn't results
from the quantum world be used
like anything else?

[SunkenCiv]

;')

[theFIRMbss]

>an end-to-end quantum computing system powered by a 16-qubit quantum processor

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A qubit's most important distinction from a classical bit, however, is not the continuous nature of the state (which can be replicated by any analog quantity), but the fact that multiple qubits can exhibit quantum entanglement. Entanglement is a nonlocal property that allows a set of qubits to express superpositions of different binary strings (01010 and 11111, for example) simultaneously. Such "quantum parallelism" is one of the keys to the potential power of quantum computation. In essence, each independent state of the quantum particle used in the computer can follow its own independent computation path to conclusion while its other states are observed and changed.

A number of qubits taken together is a quantum register. Quantum computers perform calculations by manipulating qubits.

Similarly, a unit of quantum information in a 3-level quantum system is called a qutrit, by analogy with the unit of classical information trit. The term "Qudit" is used to denote a unit of quantum information in a d-level quantum system.

Benjamin Schumacher discovered a way of interpreting quantum states as information. He came up with a way of compressing the information in a state, and storing the information on a smaller number of states. This is now known as Schumacher compression. Schumacher is also credited with inventing the term qubit (See, for example, Phys. Rev. A 51 2738 (1995)).

The state space of a single qubit register can be represented geometrically by the Bloch sphere. This is a two dimentional space which has an underlying geometry of the surface of a sphere. This essentially means that the single qubit register space has two local degrees of freedom. An n-qubit register space has 2n+1 − 2 degrees of freedom. This is much larger than 2n, which is what one would expect classically with no entanglement.

[Wikipedia via Qubit at Quantiki – the free-content WWW resource in quantum information science]

[SunkenCiv]

http://datacompression.info/IncredibleClaims.shtml

[theFIRMbss]

Quantum Leap: Computer to 'Make Computer History'

By NED POTTER, ABC News

Feb. 12, 2007 — "Quantum Computing." It's one of those things that bring a sparkle to the eyes of propellerheads — and make the rest of us just scratch our heads.

But it's been a holy grail in the arcane world of supercomputers — and a Canadian firm claims it will be unveiling one on Tuesday. Nevermind that most engineers thought quantum computers were decades away.

D-Wave Systems, Inc., based near Vancouver, is the company that's been working on the project. Its machine is described as a computer that can perform 64,000 calculations at once.

Following the odd laws of quantum mechanics, the digital "bits" that race through its circuits ...