Riverlane has reached a key stage in the commercial development of quantum computers with the successful trial of Deltaflow.OS, its high-performance, universal operating system. In Deltaflow.OS, applications are implemented on quantum hardware through a carefully chosen interface, or “hardware abstraction layer”.
Since this approach enables rapid control of operations, Deltaflow.OS will improve the performance for near-term quantum computing applications by orders of magnitude compared to other interfaces, such as those used by IBM. When carrying out quantum error-correction, which is essential to build large and reliable quantum computers, the performance improvement due to Deltaflow.OS will be on the order of 1,000 fold.
The task was carried out on a quantum computer at the University of Oxford in partnership with quantum hardware company Oxford Ionics, which operates with trapped-ion technology. A Riverlane-led consortium, consisting of Oxford Ionics, Hitachi Europe, ARM, the National Physical Laboratory as well as hardware start-ups Oxford Quantum Circuits, Seeqc, Universal Quantum and Duality Quantum Photonics, has recently been awarded a £7.6M grant by the UK government to bring Deltaflow.OS to market.
Within this grant, Deltaflow.OS will be installed on all working quantum computers in the UK which includes all four quantum hardware technologies: trapped-ion qubits, superconducting qubits, silicon qubits and photonic qubits. In the long term, quantum computers will transform cryptography and may have an impact on machine learning, artificial intelligence, agriculture, manufacturing, finance and energy.