The State of Quantum Computing Adoption with Howard Boville

This is Textron tv. Hey guys, thanks for the throne. We're here with Howard Bobbell, who is president of Engineering and Consulting Services for DXC technology, and we're talking about quantum computing, of which there's been a lot of noise lately.

Howard, welcome to the show. I'm pleased to be here. Mike, good to see you.

We saw Microsoft most recently and Google before that talking about new processors for quantum computing and making some interesting claims about advancing the pace at which we think we're gonna be able to, uh, operationalize this technology, shall we say. But is this more hype than reality? Because I'm still scratching my head about, well, is there such a thing as a compiler for quantum computing?

How do we actually invoke this stuff? Uh, well, certainly there's a, a, a crossover between classical computing and, uh, quantum computing. So in terms of the algorithms that are being created for quantum computing at the rudimentary level, it's at with the number of qubits they use, um, still needs classical computing to set that data to do further work with it.

Um, but this is the decade of quantum computing, um, that continues to pronounced by luminaries in the field, VIN Krishna from IBM, who is being one of the lead, um, person in research and development in terms of building the capabilities that they have. And then when you look at all of the actual billions of dollars around the world by companies' being invested to address the actual basic issues with quantum physics to be sold in order for quantum computing to get to a million qubits that was announced by Satya earlier this week, um, I think it continues to show even more promise that actually it will become a real thing. What kinds of applications can we build and are they gonna be things that we build and deploy alongside classical computing applications, or will eventually quantum kind of just supersede everything?

It will be complimentary. Um, essentially if we think about advances in mathematics, um, which originally were formulated in the mind and then written in sand or put in UNIFOR on the clear tablets, there's been advances in technology that's allowed branches of mathematics to become available on a broader sense. And classical computing kind of ones and zeroes allowed things such as databases, which is complex mathematical means of organizing data to come allow, become alive, and that then created companies like Oracle, like IBM's database services.

And then as classical computers have become, uh, more powerful, it allowed other more complex branches of mathematics to become available. So graph in terms of lots of nodal information then created companies like Facebook and Instagram and so on. Certainly less productive, um, uh, applications relative to what happened with databases.

And quantum computing is a mechanism of unleashing branches of mathematics that is impossible to compute on classical computing. So particularly in terms of materials management, materials creation, health and life sciences where proteins, where new material management can be modeled, um, through uh, mathematical algorithms on a quantum computer. But then coming from that, in a number of cases, the actual further work will be done in classical computing because it's more appropriate relative to the types of mathematics that have been used relative to the ones on the breakthroughs with quantum computing.

Are you concern that maybe we are gonna wind up in some set are crazy hype cycle that we saw with AI, or, um, is this kind of from your perspective on some, you know, natural order of things, curve of adoption? It's, it will go through natural hype cycles. Um, and we're probably about to kind of come into that now to get to true production, um, volumes.

There is this feud that you have to be at about, uh, 1 million qubits. We're short of a hundred thousand qubits currently, so materially less from where you need to be. There's issues around stability of the atoms.

Um, there's issues around capturing the data, um, on a sustainable basis. So there's a lot of material work, cooling work, um, stability in terms of the, um, aths that needs to be established before quantum computing is truly, um, uh, commercial value. But the approach that Microsoft has taken is interesting.

It, it uses a 1930s Italian physicists' methodologies ma, which is actually the name of the chip. And that gives us stability in terms of the atoms all being precisely placed on the actual chip set. It's taken the team 17 years to create all the various technologies for that chip to actually come into reality.

It's topological, um, quantum computing. Um, but it's interesting, it's kind of the synthesis of pure science then into actually applied science. Um, but I was reading IBM's, um, quarterly reports.

They've already generated a billion dollars of revenues through their quantum computing, um, offerings. So, um, there is clearly some commercial use cases in a material sense that's been used given that that amount of money is being spent by third parties, either public sector or private sector in terms of their platform. And that would be the same for the other, um, uh, cloud the other on some providers as well, For lack of a better phrase.

Um, the atomic unit for quantum computing that people refer to are these cubits. What exactly is a cubit and why are they not just automatically stable? The, um, the best way to describe it is to do it by means a comparison.

So a classical computer uses ones and zeroes to actually do the calculation. So I think it thing is either on or it's off. Um, so that's, that's the digital term in the case of quantum computing by using atoms.

So it's actually very much getting back to nature to do a comp, uh, calculations as opposed to ones and zeros. A, a calculation can be a one or a zero or it can be anything in between. Uh, which then gives just a much broader me means of actually the different types of calculations and increases the pace by which the calculations can take place.

It's a notion of superposition is, is the actual, uh, physics terms. Um, and it's because of the nature of an atom when observed will actually operate in a different way. Um, so because of that, when you're doing these complex mathematical equations, you've got a much greater range than either a one or a zero.

And how does that get us to being able to maybe conduct research that we couldn't do before, such as, I don't know, maybe finding cancer clusters that seem to allude us. What is it about the nature of that style of computing that is more, uh, richer in some instances than what I would do with classical computing? Yep.

So it is the speed of its computational capabilities and the different types of computational capabilities that you could do. And again, by weird example, um, there's always a, a ying and a yang to any technology that comes through. So for example, nuclear power is a potential mechanism to help, uh, reduce the amount of dependency on fossil fuels.

But also the, the, the ying of that, the dark side of nuclear power is nuclear, uh, uh, bonds. In the case of, uh, quantum computing, it has incredible potential of these types of mathematics that can allow us to address things such as life sciences and cancer, um, or all sorts of the different disease treatments. But the, the, the ing of that is, um, quantum computers can unencrypt encryption techniques that have served as well for quite some time.

Um, so RSA encryption techniques, so that means that the data that we have is protected and therefore intellectual properties protected, people's privacy is protected. And so, and the current encryption techniques that we have, if you were to use a, the most powerful classical computer that exists, it will take a billion plus years to go through all the potential permutations to unencrypt those levels of, um, um, encryption. However, when we get to a production level, quantum computing, um, something that would take over a billion years on the most powerful classical computer can be done in seconds, DCR in seconds.

So it gives you a sense to the actual incredible power of the computational capability of the quantum computer relative to a classical computer. And obviously with that it means we can do analysis of all things. Mathematics can actually underpin everything within nature, everything within materials, uh, design and management, everything within the university.

We also hear the phrase quantum resistant encryption and the rise of something known as Q day when these quantum computers are able to break all existing encryption. But based on what you're saying, is there such a thing as quantum resistant encryption? Because it seems like the quantum computers are getting bigger and better and faster than we thought.

The better way to to think about it is to be post quantum agile. So, so DXE has a post quantum security practice where we will give advisory services to our customers to actually first understand and prioritize the vulnerabilities that they have within their environments and then think about how they actually, um, protect them. There is a standards body called nist, um, which is, um, used on an international basis.

It's an American standards basis, but very often used on an international basis. And they continue to run competitions with various research labs around the world to come up with encryption techniques that will be quantum resistant. Now, I, I think the, the reason for your question is it's been proven on a number of occasions that the actual research labs that notionally add encryption techniques that have been felt to be post quantum secure, but then ultimately been deen encrypted through, through classical computing.

That alone, um, quantum computing. Um, and that's why the word agile is more important. So you create an environment where you can actually be agile with the new encryption techniques that you put in place.

Now the simplest mechanism is to actually keep yourself ahead of the quantum computing is simply to extend the length of the keys. So an ex uh, uh, an encryption technique uses factoring and the longer you make the key, the harder it is to deen encrypt. Um, now that means also that there's a lot of work you have to do in your own environments because the longer the key is, the more memory you need in your applications or in your hardware.

Um, and that's the kind of work that we at DXC out, uh, do. And that keeps you ahead at the actual arms risk of, uh, quantum computing. And it's an ability to unencrypt encryption techniques.

The systems I've seen so far are sizable. Um, it's not like something I'm gonna deploy in my own little data center somewhere. So is this always gonna be some sort of cloud service in a shared resource or over time will these systems continue to get smaller and smaller and more energy efficient?

So they're actually materially more energy efficient than classical computing already. Um, they, um, they do have to be, um, cool but incredibly, uh, cool temperatures. They have to be cool than outer space, you know, to have stability with the actual atoms, um, in terms of their size, everything will reduce in size, but the form factor that will be the majority, but not the only mechanism of actually using quantum computers will be through cloud-based solutions.

You can already use quantum computers. You can already program against quantum computers with both IBM and Google. The actual open source language you do that against is quiz kit, which you can download and then start to actually do some fairly rudimentary work on the, on the, the, uh, the more basic, um, quantum computers that are out there.

But there are some health and life science companies and hedge funds that actually buy the quantum computers themselves so that they have a proprietary advantage in terms of what they're doing with them. So what is it that I'm gonna use to, you mentioned this language, is there a different way of thinking that software developers are gonna have to have to invoke these things? I mean, 'cause we've trained developers to think in a specific kind of way all these years.

And is that gonna need to change in a, in a quantum model where maybe, you know, the old fashioned saying of two things can be true at once, but how do I program to that? So it's, it's the way that you program against quantum computing is not a thin else statements that we may be familiar with from rudimentary, um, uh, application development courses. We've done it's algorithms.

So it's, it's, it's kind of quantum physicists. It's deep applied mathematicians looking to get answers to complex mathematical problems that are computated through this incredibly powerful computational capabilities of the actual superfic superposition state that are, uh, quantum computing can be in. It's then the output of that in terms of the answers to those questions that then you would put into classical computing and apply the more logic based, um, application development there as well.

That, that's the need for the complementary element. Um, so you get the kind of the, the turbo boost, um, capability of quantum computing to get the answers to very complex mathematical questions that you're asking. Whether it's protein analysis, whether it's CO2 analysis, whether it's how you actually create a new alloy at certain, um, tenile qualities, um, um, is, is how you all see that come together.

Really that's not too different to how, um, final financial institutions and other organizations and regionally used GPUs. GPUs are get a lower publicity now because the large language models, um, for ai, again, because they got a lot more horsepower than what a classical CPU is. But prior to that, GPU by Nvidia were very used extensively across financial services institutions for their, uh, capital markets businesses.

So how they would do equity trading, fixed income trading, so again, complex mathematical elements using bit perhaps busy and statistical models on a, on a, a form factor that was appropriate for that. Quantum computing is the next mechanism to do even more complex other ethnic work. So how do I have a reasonable conversation with C-level executives who I've already shown a tendency to get a little overly excited about AI because of fear of missing out?

And am I gonna see that come full circle and how do I manage that conversation more successfully than maybe we've managed the AI conversation so far? Yeah, so, so quantum computing I've been talking about and kind of being concerned about on the kind of the deen encryption elements since probably about 2015, so 10 for 10 years, but it's a conversation that resonates with next to nobody in any enterprise environment. However, what I would say is at the end of last year and now 2025, there is a increasing appreciation as to what it can be, what it will be, but more importantly the risk.

And I think what's driven that is that under the previous administration in the United States, there's have been a number of executive orders put out that all federal agencies have to be paused upon and agile, um, by a set debt. So that's a recognition by the US government that they are vulnerable from a, um, a cybersecurity attack for their data to be taken and then deen encrypted. And as a consequence of that bringing into federal agencies, when federal agencies contract with their supply chain and the private sector, they also want their supply chain to be post quantum, agile and secure.

And therefore that starts to get an interest in terms of how you deal with the negative consequences of quantum computing as opposed to the positive. Um, and on the, the, um, your, your reference to Q there, um, the problem statement that has to be resolved here is the same problem statements for people of a particular vintage that will remember Y 2K. And that was the concern back in 1999, December 31st, that because computers for some reason never imagined that there will be the year 2000, the applications would cause all sorts of problems that banks could no longer give money, airplanes would fall out the air and so on, and a full raft of every banking system and every software system that served all industries had to be reworked in terms of their applications to deal with that issue.

Post quantum encryption and deen encryption presents the very same problem. And there is a thing called a Moscow score that calculates and your environment and the encryption envir, uh, techniques that you have and the amount of time it takes to unencrypted will tell you when you need to start to do remediation relative to when quantum computing gets to a position work in d and Crip. And the reality for every medium and large size enterprise is the deadline is already passed.

Y 2K has already passed, the work should have started some time ago. Um, so what we will see and we're starting to see within our plus quantum security practice is a trickle of conversations and I would expect throughout the course of this year that would turn from a trickle into a deluge. Some folks would say not only has the deadline passed, but um, nation states are already hoarding encrypted data on the assumption they will be able to decrypt it someday soon.

So we should we just assume that everything we thought was secure is gonna be shared soon. Yep. So that has been a stated objective for certain nature states to steal the data now harvest the data now and d Cripp letter.

Um, and that has been going on for some time. Um, it's public domain that if you look at all the various big, um, uh, data breaches in the US over the past three years, we've all had our, we've all had our identity stolen at least three times, um, uh, because of the, the large companies with the large data sets that have been stolen. And that is not by accident.

That's very clear nation state, um, cyber attacks to create a situation where it can be harvest. Now deen encrypt letter and therefore as a consequence of that, not only in the private public sector but in private sector, individuals need to think about, okay, what does that mean for their own personal protection of their identity? And increasingly we're starting to see more and more companies come up with solutions in this space, particularly in the deep fake space, um, um, and how, um, individuals can protect themselves.

So in the same ways the the negative side of quantum computing is starting to come into the consciousness of the public sector and the private sector, it will need to come into the consciousness of private individuals as well. What is that one thing from your perspective then that we're kind of overlooking as we have this discussion? 'cause you know, on the one hand you'll see the CEO of Nvidia saying this is more than a decade away.

And other folks are saying, we've got this amazing thing that we just built yesterday. I think folks are looking for guidance. So what do you tell 'em?

The key element is to start to estimate and understand what the risk is in your environment. Um, it would be easy to panic and then think you have to remediate everything going forward. And that's the advisory services that we provide where we will help you understand where your risks are, how you should prioritize that relative to your core business processes or the data sets that you have.

And then take a measured approach to de-risk those environments for yourself going forward. There'll be some areas that you, they're not mission critical to you, you're not gonna impact your core business processes as a consequence of what will happy happen here. So that's the first element to actually get visibility.

'cause, 'cause the hysteria in life in any dimension is always highest when comprehension is lost. The advisory services that we provide is get comprehension to a non level and then you can understand the risk you have, high inherent risk. What's the compensating controls you'll put in place?

What's the residual risk you have when those controls are in place and does that meet your risk appetite? Alright folks, you're hearing it here. Quantum computing, it's real, but like most things in life, it, it's a sword that cuts both ways.

So we gotta handle it with some care. Howard, thanks for being on the show. You're more than welcome, Mike.

Thank you. Alright, and back to you guys in studio.