What if you could put the idea of “optimal” back on the table? At scale, so many of the world’s problems are at a level of complexity that is computationally intractable to solve through traditional means, both today and in the decades to come. We rely on heuristics to get us to good enough, and every incremental step we can take towards optimal means huge savings in efficiency and/or performance. But what if we could take a leap forward through an entirely new form of computation? That is the promise of Quantum Computing.
This mission sets out to answer the question: can we run a real-world industrial algorithm on an actual quantum computer? And from there, can we break through the hype and determine when and for what type of algorithms quantum will reign supreme over traditional computation? In March 2019, GE and more than 600 visitors became “quantum initiates” when we ran our demonstration about how to decipher the future of this incredible technology.
This mission very quickly found its sweet spot around planning optimization as an initial use case. Through an interactive demonstration, visitors to the lab were able to take an asset sustainment problem from our Aviation service shops, see how it is formalized to be run on an adiabatic quantum computer, and in the end, ran the actual machine.
Key demonstrations/milestones:
- September 2019: The quantum computing demo is named Best Demo at the GE Research Controls Symposium.
- April 2019: The current DARPA director joins the “quantum initiate” ranks by running our demonstration.
- March 2019: Asset sustainment demo complete! Through an interactive touch table, visitors are walked through how to formalize and actually run an optimization example on a quantum computer.
-
Our Expertise
Capabilities utilized for Quantum Computing project
-
High Performance Computing
Advancing our complex mechanical systems through our abundant computational infrastructure, numerical modeling and simulation capabilities
Read more
-
Industrial Software
Bringing robust software development practices to interdisciplinary engineering teams to realize faster and more profitable outcomes
Read more
-
Enterprise Optimization
Optimizing design, operation, and supply chain decisions for complex business systems to improve yield and reduce costs
Read more
-
Real-Time Optimization
Combining Digital Twins, market data, and optimization algorithms to create supervisory control algorithms that will maximize business outcomes
Read more