Six Weeks On, the Million-Qubit Machine Runs Its First Outside Problems

SINGAPORE — When the Singapore Institute ran a million-qubit processor over the Q-Net backbone in mid-September, the achievement was a milestone; the six weeks since have made it a resource. The machine has now completed its first tranche of externally submitted problems, and the composition of the queue says as much as the qubit count. Roughly two in three of the accepted jobs, Institute schedulers report, are materials and membrane-chemistry simulations — the same reverse-osmosis filters whose cost is landing on water bills this month. "A million qubits is a headline; a booked calendar is a fact," said Dr. Wei-Lin Tan, the Institute physicist who has narrated the program to the public. Q-Net secures the channel but moves no faster than light, so remote users wait out the classical latency like everyone else. The waiting list, Tan noted, is now longer than the machine's uptime — a queue measured in months for a device measured in weeks.