Yonsei Plans IBM Nighthawk Quantum Upgrade in November
Yonsei University’s Quantum Initiative plans to replace its current IBM quantum processing unit with the company’s Nighthawk chip in November, according to the August 12 report by Seoul Economic Daily. If this upgrade proceeds as described, Yonsei would become the second reported site, after IBM’s Miami location, to operate a Nighthawk-based system.
Yonsei’s anticipated nighthawk capabilities
The Seoul-based university is already the first institution in Korea to have installed an IBM quantum computer. Jung Jae-ho, director of the Yonsei Quantum Initiative, discussed these plans during an August 11 interview at the Quantum Convergence Research Building on the Songdo International Campus in Incheon.
Jung highlighted Nighthawk’s primary advantage: denser wiring between qubits. He contrasted this with IBM’s Eagle processor, where qubits connected to approximately 2.5 other qubits, necessitating additional swap gates and leading to error accumulation during calculations.
Nighthawk employs a lattice layout where each qubit directly links to four neighbors. Jung stated that this design translates to approximately 40% more computation than Eagle at the same error level. This figure was provided by the director and hasn’t been corroborated by independent testing published in the report.
Jung also referenced IBM’s roadmap, which predicts a “technological inflection point” with the arrival of large-scale, error-corrected systems in 2029. Until then, he framed the initiative’s goal as extracting practical utility from currently available hardware.
Applications and platform development
In conjunction with the hardware upgrade, Yonsei plans to launch Q-Bridge, a platform designed to assist companies with limited quantum experience. This platform will help them input their domain problems and receive matching algorithms and computing resources.
Development is scheduled for completion in early November, coinciding with the Nighthawk installation. The initiative also intends to create a Q-Library to store use cases and apply them to similar problems over time. Both Q-Bridge and Q-Library are currently in the planning stage and are not yet operational.
In terms of research, a prominent example is in the biomedical field. Yonsei is collaborating on research into Leigh syndrome, a genetic disease, by pairing IBM’s quantum computer with Fugaku, the supercomputer operated by Japan’s RIKEN.
Director Jung illustrated the magnitude of the computational challenge:
“To identify the biological mechanism of Leigh syndrome, using Fugaku alone would require running the computer nonstop for 48 years. If a quantum computer narrows down the key candidates for calculation and takes on the first-round computation, the calculation period can be reduced to a matter of days.”
Yonsei was slated to review the initial quantum results in August and discuss subsequent steps with RIKEN. A separate project with the University of Cambridge, also utilizing the Nighthawk system, is planned. This includes collaboration between branch offices on each campus focused on drug research and the Milner Therapeutics Institute. These results, including the dramatic reduction in calculation time, remain projections.