A new educational quantum computer has begun to train students, researchers and teachers for this new era of technology. The Triangulum II, from the Chinese company SpinQ, developed in partnership with the technology company Dobslit, is installed at DigiTech, Firjan Senai's Information and Communication Technology Reference Center. The equipment is one of three educational quantum computers in Brazil and the most modern in the country.
The advancement of quantum computing opens up important perspectives for strategic sectors of the economy such as oil and gas, energy, telecommunications, logistics, financial services and technology.
For the Firjan-Senai system, technology is of interest to the industry because it can, in the future, contribute to solving problems that become difficult to process as the number of variables involved increases.
This does not necessarily mean that quantum computers will be faster than conventional computers in any and all tasks. They are machines designed to work in a different way and with certain types of problems.
Traditional computers work with bits, which represent 0 or 1. Quantum computers use qubits, which can represent 0, 1 and more combinations of these two states at the same time. This characteristic, associated with other quantum physics phenomena, allows certain calculation possibilities to be explored in a different way than conventional computing.
For Firjan-Senai, the issue for the industry is not to replace current computers, but to understand in which problems quantum computing can offer advantages and how to transform this potential into real applications.
The president of Firjan, Luiz Cesio Caetano, highlights that the quantum computer has the ability to explore several alternatives simultaneously with a greater chance of finding solutions more quickly.
“It opens up perspectives for future applications in several areas, such as logistics, finance, pharmaceuticals, as well as sovereignty and national security,” he said.
Caetano adds that quantum computing is at an early stage of adoption, but across the planet there is already a competition for the training of professionals capable of working with this technology.
"Firjan-Senai intends to build a base of professionals prepared to work in a market that is gaining global scale. The computer will be used to train students, researchers and professionals in requalification", said the president.
Companies interested in training their professionals can look to DigiTech for this training.
Digitech's operations manager, Maurício de Almeida, points out that if we don't start training students in quantum computing now, there will probably be no professionals in the future. “The information technology gap today continues to be high, and these new technologies require more and more trained people,” he said.
Digitech's special course instructor, Vagner da Costa Lima, exemplifies the advantages for the pharmaceutical industry.
“If I have a molecule that takes a long time on a classical computer, on a quantum computer I simulate much faster processing and this speeds up testing to produce a vaccine or medicine”, he explained.
The oil and technology company Technip sent some professionals for training with the quantum computer in logistics. "We learned about the machine's decision making, that it does everything very quickly. You have to give the specifications exactly to get concrete answers. It's a powerful machine", said Maria Eduarda Brigida Rolim, from Technip.
