Google's online empire is known for its speed. The web giant has spent the last decade fashioning a worldwide network of data centers and computer servers with the sole aim of delivering information to your web browser as quickly as possible.

But, at NASA's Ames Research Center, not far from Google headquarters, there's a machine that could go even faster. This is the multimillion-dollar quantum computer shared by Google and NASA, and Google engineers are already pitting the thing against the company's existing hardware and software. It's a race between the quantum computer and the classic computers.

"We set up a blue team and a red team that race each other," Google spokesman Jason Freidenfelds tells WIRED. "The blue team throws up new problem classes they believe favor the [quantum] hardware, and the red team refines classical algorithms to match or outperform the hardware."

Google isn't ready to publish any results, so it can't say where the quantum computer is outperforming its more conventional digital computers. But the company is "optimistic that we can find challenges where the [quantum] hardware is superior."

Let's say you have all these satellites and you have these rover missions and you're trying to plan and schedule that activity. That is an NP-hard problem \–Rupak Biswas

Built by a Canadian company called D-Wave, this quantum machine is one of only two in use around the world. Early research involving the system took a bit of a hit during the government shutdown last month, but things are now back up and running, with both NASA and Google running tests to better understand what the machine is actually capable of doing.

As Google runs its races, NASA is running simulations that could feed the International Space Station project and various supercomputing efforts. It's an exciting time, says Rupak Biswas, the deputy director of the Exploration Technology Directorate at Ames: the dawn of the quantum computing age.

The D-Wave machine couldn't be more different from the average computer. The thing won't work unless it's shielded from the Earth's magnetic field. Parts of it get cooled to near absolute zero. And, because it must be carefully calibrated, you need about a month to boot it up. But the inner-workings of the system are still a bit of a mystery, and it's not even clear whether this creation should be considered a true quantum computer.

With a classical computer – a computer that obeys the laws of everyday physics – information is stored in transistors. A transistor is either on or off. It either holds a one or a zero. But with quantum computing, a bit can be both a one and a zero at the same time, and that means that these computers could become really good at some types of number-crunching tasks. "These are problems of planning and scheduling, or search problems or machine learning: Things that in classical computer science are known as NP-hard because these problems are really difficult problems," Biswas says.

The D-Wave exhibits some quantum-like properties, and it has been shown to be useful for a certain class of problems, but it's not good for everything. It's not what scientists would call a "universal quantum computer." NASA, like Google, is running some early tests on the computer to better understand what kind of problems it can and cannot solve.

In the future, the space agency says, the machine could help it map out the most efficient way for a Rover mission to explore a new planet, marshaling data from dozens of outer-space observation points. "Let's say you have all these satellites and you have these rover missions, and you're trying to plan and schedule that activity. That is an NP-hard problem," Biswas says.

NASA's first tests will study techniques for scheduling supercomputer resources – figuring out which supercomputer nodes should be used at what times if you're running a thousand supercomputing jobs. They'd also like to use the machine to better schedule work on the International Space Station.

Today, NASA solves these kinds of problems using heuristics. "You make some educated guesses and you pare down your search space so that the search space becomes manageable," says Biswas. That means the space agency may not get definitive answers to its really complex problems.

NASA and Google also want to understand what exactly is happening inside their super-cooled, superconductive supercomputer. Does quantum entanglement occur – when two particles are physically separate, but remain linked at the quantum level? How about quantum tunneling? "Those are also of fundamental interest to the physicists within NASA," Biswas says. According to Freidenfelds, Google is interested in quantum entanglement as well.

For all of its coolness, the D-Wave system is small by supercomputing standards. And Biswas points out that NASA still doesn't know if it will deliver on its promise, or even if D-Wave's approach is the best way to do quantum computing. "We also have to be realistic," he says. "Just because we're trying this doesn't mean we're going to get a better answer."