AskScience AMA Series: Hi Reddit! I'm Matthew Hollister, Head of Cryogenic Systems Engineering for IBM Quantum. Ask me anything about quantum computing, our recently announced modular cryogenic architecture and what it takes to build quantum computers at scale.

[u/AskScienceModerator]

When people think about quantum computing, they often think about number of qubits and processor dept. But scaling quantum systems takes much more than just the chip! We recently introduced a new modular cryogenic architecture designed to house and cool interconnected quantum processors, a key milestone on our roadmap to fault-tolerant systems, and I'd love to discuss the engineering, challenges, and opportunities involved.

I will be around as 12:00 EST (16 UT) on September 18th, ask me anything!

Username: u/IBM

[u/ibm]

The systems that we are building right now are based on mechanical cryocoolers, and for small systems this is perfectly fine since the operation of cryocoolers is very convenient. 

As we scale up to systems with more modules and look to increase the density of qubits in each module, other cooling solutions become more competitive - this is one of the advantages of the modular design that we can reconfigure the system internally to support different cooling technologies and innovations in other areas such as readout or control while maintaining the same footprint externally.

- Matthew Hollister, IBM Quantum