type privately held company industry computer hardware founded 1999 headquarters burnaby british columbia canada key people vern brownell ceo geordie rose cto eric ladizinsky cs v. paul lee chair products d wave one d wave two d wave 2x revenue n a net income n a number of employees approx . 100 subsidiaries none website dwavesys.com d wave systems inc. is a quantum computing company based in burnaby british columbia canada . d wave is the first company in the world to sell quantum computers . the d wave one was built on early prototypes such as d wave s orion quantum computer . the prototype was a 16 qubit quantum annealing processor demonstrated on february 13 2007 at the computer history museum in mountain view california . 1 d wave demonstrated what they claimed to be a 28 qubit quantum annealing processor on november 12 2007 . 2 the chip was fabricated at the nasa jet propulsion laboratory microdevices lab in pasadena california . 3 these early prototypes were built upon the research papers by umesh vazirani leading researcher on quantum complexity theory who dismissed d wave s claims of speedup as a misunderstanding of his work and suggested that even if it turns out to be a true quantum computer and even if it could be scaled to thousands of qubits it would likely not be more powerful than a cellphone . on may 11 2011 d wave systems announced d wave one described as the world s first commercially available quantum computer operating on a 128 qubit chipset 4 using quantum annealing a general method for finding the global minimum of a function by a process using quantum fluctuations 5 6 7 8 to solve optimization problems . in may 2013 a collaboration between nasa google and the universities space research association usra launched a quantum artificial intelligence lab based on the d wave two 512 qubit quantum computer that would be used for research into machine learning among other fields of study . 9 on august 20 2015 d wave systems announced 10 the general availability of the d wave 2x 11 system a 1000 qubit quantum computer . this was followed by an announcement 12 on september 28 2015 that it had been installed at the quantum artificial intelligence lab at nasa ames research center . contents 1 history 2 computer systems 2.1 orion prototype 2.1.1 2009 google demonstration 2.2 d wave one 2.2.1 lockheed martin and d wave collaboration 2.2.2 optimization problem solving in protein structure determination 2.3 d wave two 2.4 d wave 2x 3 comparsion of d wave systems 4 reception 5 notable alumni and collaborators 6 see also 7 references 8 external links history edit d wave was founded by haig farris former chair of board geordie rose cto and former ceo bob wiens former cfo and alexandre zagoskin 13 former vp research and chief scientist . farris taught a business course at the university of british columbia ubc where rose obtained his ph.d. and zagoskin was a postdoctoral fellow . the company name refers to their first qubit designs which used d wave superconductors . d wave operated as an offshoot from ubc while maintaining ties with the department of physics and astronomy . 14 it funded academic research in quantum computing thus building a collaborative network of research scientists . the company collaborated with several universities and institutions including ubc ipht jena universit de sherbrooke university of toronto university of twente chalmers university of technology university of erlangen and jet propulsion laboratory.these partnerships were listed on d wave s website until 2005 . 15 16 in june 2014 d wave announced a new quantum applications ecosystem with computational finance firm 1qb information technologies 1qbit and cancer research group dna seq to focus on solving real world problems with quantum hardware . 17 d wave operated from various locations in vancouver british columbia and laboratory spaces at ubc before moving to its current location in the neighboring suburb of burnaby . d wave also has offices in palo alto and vienna united states of america computer systems edit photograph of a chip constructed by d wave systems inc. designed to operate as a 128 qubit superconducting adiabatic quantum optimization processor mounted in a sample holder . the first commercially produced d wave processor was a programmable 18 superconducting integrated circuit with up to 128 pair wise coupled 19 superconducting flux qubits . 20 21 22 the 128 qubit processor was superseded by a 512 qubit processor in 2013 . 23 the processor is designed to implement a special purpose quantum annealing 5 6 7 8 as opposed to being operated as a universal gate model quantum computer . d wave maintains a list of peer reviewed technical publications by their own scientists and others on their website . 24 orion prototype edit on february 13 2007 d wave demonstrated the orion system running three different applications at the computer history museum in mountain view california . this marked the first public demonstration of supposedly a quantum computer and associated service . the first application an example of pattern matching performed a search for a similar compound to a known drug within a database of molecules . the next application computed a seating arrangement for an event subject to compatibilities and incompatibilities between guests . the last involved solving a sudoku puzzle . the processors at the heart of d wave s orion quantum computing system are designed for use as hardware accelerator processors rather than general purpose computer microprocessors . the system is designed to solve a particular np complete problem related to the two dimensional ising model in a magnetic field . 1 d wave terms the device a 16 qubit superconducting adiabatic quantum computer processor . 25 26 according to the company a conventional front end running an application that requires the solution of an np complete problem such as pattern matching passes the problem to the orion system . according to geordie rose founder and chief technology officer of d wave np complete problems are probably not exactly solvable no matter how big fast or advanced computers get ; the adiabatic quantum computer used by the orion system is intended to quickly compute an approximate solution . 27 2009 google demonstration edit on december 8 2009 at the neural information processing systems nips conference a google research team led by hartmut neven used d wave s processor to train a binary image classifier . d wave one edit on may 11 2011 d wave systems announced the d wave one an integrated quantum computer system running on a 128 qubit processor . the processor used in the d wave one code named rainier performs a single mathematical operation discrete optimization . rainier uses quantum annealing to solve optimization problems . the d wave one is claimed to be the world s first commercially available quantum computer system . 28 the price will be approximately us 10 000 000 . 29 a research team led by matthias troyer and daniel lidar found that while there is evidence of quantum annealing in d wave one they saw no speed increase compared to classical computers . they implemented an optimized classical algorithm to solve the same particular problem as the d wave one . 30 31 lockheed martin and d wave collaboration edit on may 25 2011 lockheed martin signed a multi year contract with d wave systems to realize the benefits based upon a quantum annealing processor applied to some of lockheed s most challenging computation problems . the contract included purchase of the d wave one quantum computer system maintenance and associated professional services . 32 optimization problem solving in protein structure determination edit in august 2012 a team of harvard university researchers presented results of the largest protein folding problem solved to date using a quantum computer . the researchers solved instances of a lattice protein folding model known as the miyazawa jernigan model on a d wave one quantum computer . 33 34 d wave two edit main article d wave two in early 2012 d wave systems revealed a 512 qubit quantum computer code named vesuvius 35 which was launched as a production processor in 2013 . 36 in may 2013 catherine mcgeoch a consultant for d wave published the first comparison of the technology against regular top end desktop computers running an optimization algorithm . using a configuration with 439 qubits the system performed 3 600 times as fast as cplex the best algorithm on the conventional machine solving problems with 100 or more variables in half a second compared with half an hour . the results are presented at the computing frontiers 2013 conference . 37 in march 2013 several groups of researchers at the adiabatic quantum computing workshop at the institute of physics in london produced evidence though only indirect of quantum entanglement in the d wave chips . 38 in may 2013 it was announced that a collaboration between nasa google and the usra launched a quantum artificial intelligence lab at the nasa advanced supercomputing division at ames research center in california using a 512 qubit d wave two that would be used for research into machine learning among other fields of study . 9 39 d wave 2x edit on august 20 2015 d wave released general availability of their d wave 2x computer with 1 152 qubits in a chimera graph architecture although due to magnetic offsets and manufacturing variability inherent in the superconductor circuit fabrication fewer than 1152 qubits are functional and available for use . the exact number of qubits yielded will vary with each specific processor manufactured . this was accompanied by a report comparing speeds with high end single threaded cpus . unlike previous reports this one explicitly stated that question of quantum speedup was not something they were trying to address and focused on constant factor performance gains over classical hardware . for general purpose problems a speedup of 15x was reported but it is worth noting that these classical algorithms benefit efficiently from parallelization so that the computer would be performing on par with perhaps 30 high end single threaded cores . the d wave 2x processor is based on a 2 048 qubit chip with half of the qubits disabled but these may be re activated later on . 40 41 comparsion of d wave systems edit d wave one d wave two d wave 2x d wave 2017 42 available may 2011 may 2013 august 2015 q1 2017 code name rainier vesuvius qubits 128 512 1152 2000 couplers 352 3000 josephson junctions 24 000 128 000 i o control lines 192 operating tempature 0.02 k 0.015 k power consumption 15.5 kw 25 kw buyers lockheed martin lockheed martin google nasa ursa lockheed martin google nasa ursa los alamos national laboratory reception edit in 2007 umesh vazirani a professor at university of california uc berkeley and one of the founders of quantum complexity theory upon which d wave is based made the following criticism 43 their claimed speedup over classical algorithms appears to be based on a misunderstanding of a paper my colleagues van dam mosca and i wrote on the power of adiabatic quantum computing . that speed up unfortunately does not hold in the setting at hand and therefore d wave s quantum computer even if it turns out to be a true quantum computer and even if it can be scaled to thousands of qubits would likely not be more powerful than a cell phone . wim van dam a professor at uc santa barbara summarized the scientific community consensus as of 2008 in the journal nature physics 44 an article in the may 12 2011 edition of nature gives details which critical academics say proves that the company s chips do have some of the quantum mechanical properties needed for quantum computing . 45 46 prior to the