PiCloud, the leader in providing easy access to conventional computing power on the cloud, and D-Wave Systems Inc., the leader in commercial quantum computing technology, have announced a formal development partnership. Projects are underway to integrate the two companies' technologies.

"PiCloud is a cloud computing platform dedicated to giving every developer, scientist, and engineer in the world a supercomputer at their fingertips," stated PiCloud co-Founder Ken Elkabany.

The partnership will align the two companies' development goals. D-Wave's development library will be integrated with PiCloud's cloud platform to give developers easy remote access to both quantum and conventional computing power from within the same framework. With the thousands of cores that can be leveraged on-demand with PiCloud, developers will be able to access a new type of supercomputing / quantum computing hybrid capability from anywhere with Internet access.

"Because of the exotic nature of our technology, it was designed from the ground up to be used remotely. This remote access model works beautifully with PiCloud's cloud computing platform. As a developer, you can send parts of your code to the conventional cloud, and parts to D-Wave quantum computers, and the result is a tool that provides access to a new type of high performance computer that has never existed before," said D-Wave Founder and CTO Dr. Geordie Rose.

"D-Wave was a natural fit for PiCloud," said Elkabany, "as we operate in some of the same market spaces, such as financial modeling, defense systems, biological modeling and image analysis. We share the same vision of making all of the world's compute capability – be it conventional or quantum – easily accessible."

D-Wave's quantum computing technology is designed to excel at machine learning and optimization problems. These types of problems naturally arise in "Big Data" applications where enormous amounts of data must be handled and processed. The classical computing power that PiCloud provides allows aspects of handling Big Data to be done using conventional cloud techniques, while specialized, highly complex tasks can be run on D-Wave hardware.

"One very interesting application of such hybrid systems is in large-scale machine learning, where data volumes are vast, and the learning process requires solution of large numbers of combinatorial optimization problems," said Dr. Suzanne Gildert, Applications Strategist for D-Wave. "This allows all of the best practices currently used for handling and processing large data volumes to continue to be used, but now with a specialized hardware system designed to solve the hard combinatorial nuggets that conventional computers can't deal with."