While practical employment of quantum computing remains out of reach for the time being, a National Security Agency (NSA) said this week that industry and government must work closely together to lay the groundwork for quantum capabilities to be easily adopted when the time comes for widescale deployment.
Neal Ziring, Technical Director at NSA’s Cybersecurity Directorate, discussed the need for quantum technology creators to produce the tech with a low barrier to entry during the Palo Alto Networks Public Sector Ignite conference on April 2.
“We’re going to need to continue to develop it, and it will be interoperable and [with] low barrier to entry kind of toolkits that allows folks who are building computing systems –
whether they’re for logistics, material science, or whatever – to incorporate the quantum computing capabilities,” he said.
Ziring also said that while quantum computing will usher in a new age of computing, it will not ultimately replace classical computing capabilities currently in use.
“Quantum computers aren’t going to replace our classical computers,” he said. “They’re going to augment them and give them the ability to perform certain computations exponentially faster. But they’re still going to need … that classical computer alongside,” said Ziring.
“Making that boundary seamless [between classical and quantum computers] so that you can offload to the quantum computer the calculations that it’s good at, and then easily accept those back and incorporate them into the overall classical calculation, will be a tremendous enabler and it’s one we’re really going to need,” he explained.
While a practical quantum computer has still not emerged on the cybersecurity scene, Ziring offered his prediction of when such computers might become available.
“A noisy intermediate scale quantum computer that you can reliably use for mission critical things [such as] to do an optimization problem [or] to train machine learning … I’m thinking three to five years out. That’s my crystal ball prediction,” stated Ziring.
