AQUA@home: Difference between revisions

'''[https://web.archive.org/web/20090309055929/http://aqua.dwavesys.com/ AQUA@home]''' (an acronym for '''A'''diabatic '''QU'''antum '''A'''lgorithms) was a [[wikipedia:volunteer computing|Volunteer computing]] project operated by [[wikipedia:D-Wave Systems|D-Wave Systems]], a quantum computing company based in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada.<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AQUA@home |title=AQUA@home |website=Wikipedia |access-date=2026-06-27}}</ref> The project ran on the [[BOINC]] platform and used the spare processing time of volunteers' computers to predict the performance of [[wikipedia:superconductivity|superconducting]] [[wikipedia:adiabatic quantum computation|adiabatic quantum computers]] on problems drawn from fields ranging from materials science to machine learning.<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AQUA@home |title=AQUA@home |website=Wikipedia |access-date=2026-06-27}}</ref> AQUA@home designed and analyzed quantum computing algorithms using [[Quantum Monte Carlo]] techniques.<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://www.overclock.net/threads/aqua-home.789241/ |title=Aqua@home |website=Overclock.net |date=2010-07-30 |access-date=2026-06-27}}</ref>

The project holds two notable firsts within the BOINC ecosystem: it was the first BOINC project to deploy a multi-threaded application, and the first to deploy an [[OpenCL]] application.<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AQUA@home |title=AQUA@home |website=Wikipedia |access-date=2026-06-27}}</ref> AQUA@home ceased operating in August 2011.<ref>{{Cite web |url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AQUA@home |title=AQUA@home |website=Wikipedia |access-date=2026-06-27}}</ref>