Rigetti Computing has been awarded up to $8.6 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), as part of a larger collaboration with the NASA Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (QuAIL) and Universities Space Research Association (USRA), to develop a full-stack system with proven quantum advantage for solving real world problems.
In particular, the work will address complex scheduling problems that remain hard or impossible for classical computers to solve. Using quantum computers to find new solutions could have important implications for national security, such as real-time strategic asset deployment, as well as commercial applications including global supply chain management, network optimization, or vehicle routing.
The collaboration will focus on developing a superconducting quantum processor, hardware-aware software, and custom algorithms based on real-world scenarios. In addition, the NASA-USRA team will design methods for benchmarking the hardware against classical computers to determine quantum advantage.
The grant is part of the DARPA ONISQ (Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum) program. (PRNewswire)