D-Wave Quantum extends agreement with Aramco

D-Wave Quantum announced that it has extended its agreement with Aramco, a global integrated energy and chemicals company, to manage geophysical optimization problems through quantum technologies. Aramco Research Center in Delft, the Netherlands, is focused on developing advanced computing technologies to help address global energy challenges. For the past two years, it has been working with D-Wave’s powerful quantum technologies on solving highly complex optimization problems involved in computationally intensive seismic imaging, an ultrasound-like technology used to map the various geological strata many kilometers beneath the surface. With support from D-Wave, the team has been able to create its first subsurface maps, using tens of gigabytes of seismic data as input, with the aim of processing a terabyte of seismic data with the D-Wave quantum computer in 2024. Using D-Wave’s quantum computers and hybrid solvers, accessible through the Leap quantum cloud service, Aramco’s team of researchers developed their own hybrid classical-quantum geophysical applications. Using D-Wave’s quantum technologies, the Center has seen performance gains over classical computers in both time-to-solution and scale.