PICTURE SHOWS: Electra, NASA???s powerful modular supercomputer, was also used in this collaboration with Google. It is a petascale supercomputer that saves significant amounts of water and power annually. ... STORY COPY: Google, in partnership with NASA and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has demonstrated the ability to compute in seconds what would take even the largest and most advanced supercomputers thousands of years, achieving a milestone known as quantum supremacy. ??sQuantum computing is still in its infancy, but this transformative achievement rockets us forward,??? said Eugene Tu, center director at NASA???s Ames Research Center in California???s Silicon Valley. ??sOur missions in the decades to come to the Moon, Mars and beyond are all fueled by innovations like this one.??? Quantum computing is the study of how to harness the unique properties of quantum mechanics to solve certain types of problems far faster than on traditional computers. Potentially, NASA could one day use these techniques to support space missions, with quantum optimization making mission schedules more efficient and quantum simulation supporting the design of light and robust materials for modern spacecraft ??" just to name a few applications. This milestone is the first step toward that future. ??sAchieving quantum supremacy means we???ve been able to do one thing faster, not everything faster,??? said Eleanor Rieffel, co-author on the paper on this result, published today in Nature, and the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Lead at Ames. ??sAnd even though that one thing isn???t terribly useful, that it has been done at all is groundbreaking.??? The paper describes the experiments run by Google???s Sycamore quantum processor to demonstrate quantum supremacy. Computations on a quantum computer are called ??squantum circuits.??? These computer science abstractions work like programs, specifying a series of operations for the quantum processor to run. The t