We’re at a moment in time where computing is poised to reshape just about every industry, field of study — and even society itself. Across the fields of AI, cloud, and quantum computing, we’ve seen massive advancements in recent years. It’s the result of decades of research, scientific curiosity, and plain hard work, across a variety of scientific and technical disciplines of which we’re now starting to see the culmination.
AI has emerged as a driving force behind countless automated business decisions every day. Cloud computing has expanded into a set of systems that has put us on a path towards being able to leverage the entire world’s compute power as if it were a single infinitely powerful computer. And quantum computing has rapidly evolved from just one online device six years ago to a global fleet of systems, with potential to upend countless industries.
Separately, these three technologies have the potential to find new solutions to problems that can change the world. But when we’re able to leverage some of them, or all three together, in new ways, the potential for discovering new materials, finding novel drugs and new uses for existing ones, solving science’s hardest problems, and myriad other revelations, will be unlike anything we’ve seen before
We’ve come to call this accelerated discovery. It’s now a core part of the work we’re doing at IBM Research. We believe, given all these advancements in computing in recent years, and our deep research across these fields, we’re in a unique position to leverage accelerated discovery for IBM, our partners, and society. The world is changing rapidly every day: just look at how quickly vaccines were developed and deployed for COVID-19, and the technologies attempting to mitigate the impact of climate change.
Just last week, we announced our latest Discovery Accelerator, in partnership with the government of Quebec. It's the fifth Discovery Accelerator we've launched in recent years, and our first in Canada. We'll be installing a Quantum System One quantum computer and a dedicated a high-performance computing cluster for AI at our facility in Bromont, Quebec. We’re aiming to help accelerate research in a range of fields of study, including sustainability, therapeutics, and semiconductors.
I invite you to read the entire post on our point of view on accelerated discovery, written by Alessandro Curioni, IBM Fellow and Vice President of IBM Research Europe, on why we see this being such a pivotal time for the future of computing, and how we’re uniquely poised to rise to this opportunity.
