The race to develop a universal quantum computer is gaining up speed, now IBM claimed a breakthrough that paves the way to large-scale systems that can operate reliably.

IBM researchers have recently developed error-correction techniques that can maintain the integrity of computations performed using qubits, or quantum bits.

Quantum computing has been viewed as a way to advance beyond today’s PCs and servers. A company called D-wave systems has already made a purpose-built quantum computer that is useful for specific tasks.

IBM wanted to build something which could be even larger than the previous one. It wanted to build a ‘universal’ quantum computer that can run a wide range of applications like a PC or server. A universal quantum computer might need 100 million qubits, said researchers.

Experts said that the complexity of quantum computing systems and the fragility of the interactions among qubits makes error corrections important, but also becomes a challenge.

Jay Gambetta, a manager of IBM’s quantum computing and information group said that presently the researchers are mainly focusing upon limited sets of qubits. But IBM wants to bring error correction to larger systems, he said.

“Now we’re getting to the point where we’re putting together and doing practical computing. It will be very exciting over the next few years”, Gambetta said.

Quantum computing is one of the ways to advance computing once it becomes physically and economically impractical to build smaller, more powerful chips based on silicon and conventional techniques.

Conventional computers, on the other hand, are predictable by nature, and use electrical transistors to represent data as ones and zeros.

Gambetta didn’t give any hint about when a universal quantum computer would come out. He called the process as a long journey on which several researchers are working together.