LEESBURG, Va., April 23, 2020 — Quantum Computing Inc. announced the release of version 1.1 of its Mukai middleware with new capabilities delivering higher performance and greater ease of use for subject-matter experts developing quantum-ready applications needing superior performance today.  The Mukai software stack (released in January 2020) can be used to solve extremely complex optimization problems.  Mukai enables developers to create and execute quantum-ready applications on classical computers, while being ready to run on quantum computers when those systems can achieve performance advantages. QCI has already demonstrated superior performance today for some applications built on Mukai and running on classical computers.

The new capabilities in the Mukai 1.1 release include a) delivering a greater diversity of more-optimal results in less time for  larger, more memory-intense problems; b) better ease of use by automating some of the process for solving optimization problems, such as finding good values for the weights between different factors (i.e., Lagrange multipliers), and c) improved manageability and robustness for production use, including performance instrumentation and improved error-handling and -reporting.  The performance improvements have been measured for both graph partitioning and for optimization problems from industry sources.  These new capabilities are all available immediately in the QCI cloud-delivered Mukai service.

Discrete combinatorial optimization is one high-value class of problems expected to benefit greatly from quantum computers, and techniques for exploiting quantum computers for optimization have been deeply explored, evidenced by the work on quantum annealers by early D-Wave researchers and on gate-model QCs by researchers of the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA).  QCI’s Mukai software stack is centered on the quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) formulation well known to quantum annealing users.  The Mukai software product includes two primary user/developer interfaces – the QCI NetworkX graph-analysis package and the QCI qbsolv QUBO solver.  Modeled on the D-Wave NetworkX package targeting quantum annealing, QCI NetworkX implements a set of extremely compute-intense (NP-hard to mathematicians) graph kernels that are expected to benefit the most from QCs¹; the kernels use the QUBO formulation.  “The QCI Qbsolv QUBO solver allows the users to balance the quality of the solution against the time to deliver results. The user can choose to get a good answer quickly, an excellent answer in more time, and/or a diverse set of good answers”, stated Mike Booth, Quantum Computer Inc. CTO.  “Mukai has demonstrated superior performance today for some applications, executing on classical computers for early clients, for problems such as portfolio optimization and HPC application optimization via better graph partitioning”, he added.

QCI, an industry leader in the development of quantum-ready software, has deep experience developing applications and tools for early quantum computers and focuses on abstractions that free application developers to focus on the vital task of mapping problems to appropriate quantum computing forms by obscuring hardware-specific details.  Quantum computing (QC) technology, applications, and use cases will evolve significantly as different architectures for QC hardware come to market. Implementation of QC applications will be significantly accelerated by tools that enable the development and execution of applications independent of any particular QC architecture. QCI provides those tools.

In a webinar to be hosted Noon Eastern Time / 9AM Pacific Time April 28, 2020, Steve Reinhardt, Vice President, Product Development, will provide an overview of QCI’s technical strategy and roadmap, and provide a demonstration of QCI NetworkX’s capabilities in solving graph problems. The webinar will conclude after a question and answer session. Questions regarding QCI’s strategy, Mukai, and QCI NetworkX can be sent in advance to i[email protected].  Registration for the webinar is required, please use this link: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_1Heu2PVVQtKOp5t8ZJG9SA.

¹ Namely, graph partitioning, maximum cut, minimum vertex cover, minimum vertex coloring, maximum independent set, maximal matching, maximum clique, and Markov-network assignment.

About QCI

Quantum Computing Inc. is a technology company focused on developing novel applications and solutions powered by quantum and quantum-inspired computing to solve difficult problems in various industries. QCI is exploiting its collective expertise in finance, computing, security, mathematics, and physics to develop commercial applications for the financial, security, and government sectors.  For more information about QCI’s products or about becoming a QCI partner or reseller, please visit www.QuantumComputingInc.com or email us at [email protected].

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Source: QCI