D-Wave Quantum Inc. (NASDAQ: QBTS) has been awarded up to CAD $300,000 in funding from the National Research Council of Canada's Applied Quantum Computing Challenge program to develop annealing quantum computing software for commercial applications.

D-Wave's team at its facility in Burnaby, British Columbia, will work alongside the NRC to build next-generation algorithms and integrate them into the company's open-source Ocean software development kit. The project focuses on creating graph minor-embedding algorithms designed for D-Wave's Zephyr topology, which maps optimization problems to the architecture of its Advantage2 annealing quantum computers.

The new algorithms are intended to expand the scale and complexity of problems the Advantage2 system can process across areas including logistics, manufacturing, scheduling, resource allocation, machine learning, and materials simulation.

"Software innovation is essential to expanding the performance and commercial impact of quantum computing," said Dr. Trevor Lanting, chief development officer at D-Wave. "Through our collaboration with the NRC, we aim to develop next-generation software that extends the capabilities of our Advantage2 annealing quantum computers."

The NRC's Applied Quantum Computing Challenge program is designed to accelerate the commercialization of quantum technologies through collaboration among government, industry, and academia, according to the press release.