Slashdot Mirror
Web Quantum Computer Simulator
Heraklit writes "As reported on Heise News, the Frauenhofer Institute of Computer Architecture and Software Technology has made available the first online quantum computer simulator - it will be simulating up to 31 quantum bits, for testing new advanced quantum algorithms. Behind the scenes, it is a 32 node Athlon 3200 Myrinet Linux Cluster with 56GByte RAM! Now imagine the computing power of a few hundred qubits, if ever constructed..."
Wow, I really hope that they didn't put those 32 processors and 56GB of DDR RAM into use for this. Sounds like they should have read this article instead. Maybe it would have been cooler and not so grainy!
oh my god, I hope that it is only a few years after Quantom computing is broken into that normal people can buy those suckers.
can you imagine how long it would take consumer software vendors to catch up to that power? hardware vendors would have to build in planed obsolesce just to make money.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
The algorithm in psuedo-code:
int qbit[32];
for ( i = 0; i < 32; i++ )
qbit[i] = (rand() >>30) & 0x01;
Nice rack, seriously. Clean, uncluttered.
I better get studying on Quantum Computers....
For The Best Jazz/Hip-hop fusion > COlD DUCK
an open disussion from 2003!
Since power and probably complexity to program increases exponentially.
... I can factor the number 15.
It's more convenient than Web interface and has no arbitrary limits...it's a quantum computing module for Perl! There's also libquantum for C users, and QCF for Matlabbers.
If I did, they would collapse into a single state and be useless as quantum computers.
A "PC" that just scrapes Longhorn's requirements.
Get paid to search..It's geniune and
"Now imagine the computing power of a few hundred qubits, if ever constructed..."
:)
Tron?
Click for offensive t-sh
Imagine the amount of rendering you could do with that thing. It'd be like having a bazillion artists painting pixels for you. How long until Pixar and co jumps on the bandwagon? This type of technology has some amazing possibilities ergo it would be no suprise if commercial support came about very quickly.
Keep the faith, share the code
The only question left is, can a Quantum Computer Simulator handle the /. effect?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Aww, I have a fan club! Thanks AC! This is the greatest day of my life!
Oh wait.
ie me, can somebody please explain in lay persons terms what simulation of quantum processes involves?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
THe longhorn specs are actually calling for a 31-qbit computer! I knew it!
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
You changed the outcome of the loading time of the page by posting a link to it!
I also reply below your current threshold.
'Now imagine the computing power of a few hundred qubits, if ever constructed...'
A few hundred qubits would be very powerful at factoring numbers and other such specialized algorithms. But as far as linux and other "normal" software goes, a few hundred qubit computer won't be any better than a few hundred bit software.
If that had been a 32 node Itantium cluster, Intel could have boasted of doubled Itantium sales for that quarter.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
and the answer I got was....
I don't know. I don't even know what the fuck I did. Just pushed buttons and two minutes later it told me I was done! THE QUANTUM POWER IS AMAZING!
Casual Games/Downloads
Isn't Qbit that dude that jumps all over the pile of blocks?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
The techs that can come for this computing power is unimaginable. Several physicits have said that it would take a quantum computer on the scall of a contemporary computer to achieve feats such as teleportation (Star Trek, eat your heart out!)
Michael Chricton (of course) has dealt with the subject quite entertainingly in the novel Timeline. Again, I say the novel.
Aren't these the same folks that hold the MP3 encoder patents? If they are the same people I wonder when they'll patent the quantum computing algorithms?
harnessing the power of quantum computing to defend their webserver against hords of curious Slashdot geeks.
The scaling is not 1:1, so while it takes 32 Athlon processors with 56GB of ram, the processing power of 31 qbits is not that of the 32-processor cluster. This is an emulator, so the actual 31-qbit probably isn't quite as powerful as the hardware required to accurately mathematically model it. So while the computing power of a few hundred real qbits might be impressive, the computing power required to simulate those few hundred qbits would be extremely impressive.
-F
They've taken out all the fun of the "imagine a beowulf cluster of these..." by putting it in the article itself...DARN YOU SLASHDOT! DARN YOU TO HECK!
Until somebody went and looked at it.
(Or does that need 42 Q-bits?)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Imagine a beowulf cluster of....oh nevermind I don't feel like getting redundancy points.
1) This is C code, not pseudocode.
1) There are 31 qbits, not 32.
3) Why the right shift by 30 bits on the rand()? You're AND-ing this with 0x01 anyway, so the final outcome will either be 0 or 1. Quite perplexing.
... is develop a quantum algorithm that can handle a decent amount of slashdoters!
Are you kidding? Get off of my Internet, TROLL.
--- "When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all..."
Now we're making computer simulations of...COMPUTERS?
As a computer modeller (of ground water) this seems somewhat redundant to me...then of course I didn't RTFA so I'm no doubt missing something.
If God had had a computer it would have taken him 7 months to create the earth...if he even bothered to do it at all.
> Why the right shift by 30 bits on the rand()
Read the rand() manpage
I know everyone's excited about this, but keep in mind that it's 2^31 times slower than the thing it's trying to simulate. That's because it can't really take advantage of the exponential speedup from working with entangled states. Or, more accurately, it gets an exponential speedup at the cost of an exponential slowdown.
So that fraunhofer (german) cant't patent the algoritms used for quantum computing.
Interesting that an institute like this uses Zope / Plone for their web server.
I've googled for it, and found articles and discussions on quantum computing no end, and seen the talk in computer magazines, but unfortunately none of the stuff has managed to even begin to explain to me how it really works. I just don't get the hang of it. (Maybe I'm just uncommonly thick... But I distinctly got the feeling that some of those editors weren't any better off...)
:)
I would really appreciate it if somebody could just briefly unfold it here, in fairly layman terms. What kind of problems do you solve with it? (How?) How do you program a computer like that? Does the architecture have anything in common with "traditional" computers? How do you manufacture those computers? Et cetera, anything is welcome that you feel could help explain it...
I have understood that a "bit" in a QC can have any value at any given time, and that's usually where I fall off already... Thanks for any attepmts from you wiser folks!
For those of you who don't know: The biggest problem with quantum computing is that you can never extract all the information you compute. So you can process y=f(x) for 2^31 values of x simultaneously, but when you go to read y from the computer, you just get one solution, and what's worse, you don't even know which value of X it corresponds to!
Using Shor's factoring algorythm, however, you can extract one of the factors of a large number without knowing all the other factors. That would be useful for public key encryption. I wouldn't worry about your PGP key just yet though. 7 q-bit computers are incredibly difficult to make. The process used to make the 7-bit QC does not scale to larger numbers easily. 2048 bit computers are way beyond our technical skills.
On a side-note, I wonder if each computer simulates a q-bit (with one responsible for management). It would be the most obvious way to run the simulation, but may or may not be the fastest. There would need to be a lot of cross-communication since all the q-bits are entangled in any interesting quantum computation.
I'm confused.
How can a quantum computer be simulated by a normal computer? I'm missing something. I thought the whole point of building quantum computers was that they did work that regular computers were incapable of.
So this has to be a bad simulation. If this were a good simulation, there would be no point to building a qc. So why do we want a bad simulation?
No, really... First time in the history of mankind... ;-)
Paul B.
... welcome our new simulated q-bit overlords.
for a minute there, i lost myself...
Are quantum computers any better than a Turing machine?
What I dont really get about this, is that if a quantum computer can be simulated using normal computers, then whats the big deal about quantum computers in the first place? Of course there are all the textbook theories about the benefits of a quantum computer etc. But my limited understanding of quantum physics suggests to me that
a) its impossible to simulate a quantum computer this way.
and
b), if it is possible then it cant possibly behave in the same way as a real one.
nick
(waiting for a physicist to enlighten me...)
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
It computes really fast as long as you don't actually want the answer.
--- Ban humanity.
I made him the judge, actually.
"Now imagine a few hundred qubits, if ever constructed..."
There is a beowulf cluster of these in my home office.
Unfortunately when I get home the existance & non-existanc of this cluster will coalesce into a single state. I'm betting on non-existance.
of a few thousand /.'ers about a hundred years from now, sitting at their desks, running Linux 23.5.31 on their 2048-qbit computers, looking through the archives and laughing their collective asses off at the "imagine a simulation of a few hundred qbits..." part.
Peace and Love,
Terry
->-
"Let's see, I used to know what a qubit was. Well, don't you worry about that. Just get some particles, build it."
The Wikipedia articles linked to below will certainly get you started, but they will make your head hurt.
To ease the pain in your head I recommend Nick Herbert's Quantum Reality, a popular title, but clear, concise and accurate.
There are a lot of popular works on Quantum Mechanics, but they all play the "pick any two" game with clarity, concision and accuracy. Herbert's is the only one I've found that nails all three.
One of the things that I particularly like about Herbert's book is the way he makes it explicitly clear that various models built upon interpretations of QM are a)interpretations, not QM itself and b)exclusionary.
QM presents certain logical ambiguities and paradoxes when we try to interpret it into the common world of understanding. Various models have been made to to try to deal those issues. Popular "philosophers" like to mix and match these interpretational models, believing they're a)all really the same interpretation and b)Quantum physics.
"So there I was, cruising along faster than light, backwards in time through the multiverse. . . "
But you can't do that, take one from column A and two from column B. Each interpretation is a logical structure unto itself and if you accept the multiverse interpretation adding elements from some other interpretations actually breaks the model's relation to QM.
The above 'quote' is like saying:
"So, I calculated my trajectory by Newton's Laws, but banged into a crystal sphere of Mars because I neglected one of the epicycles and didn't correct for General Relativistic forces. There's a chance I misread the initial conditions data from the chicken entrails as well."
Anyway, just read the book. It'll make you a better person, or at least a person with a more accurate view of QM than nonphysicits who haven't. Just 250 pages, so it's not even some huge tome that takes a multimonth commitment. Like I said, it's concise. Like a good O'Reilly book.
KFG
Well that's like saying, why build a RISC processor when we already have i386 architectures? Why don't we just emulate RISC on i386? and of course that's a stupid question, because a simulation/emulation like that is far slower and innefficiant than the real thing. Same thing here, the real thing will be far far better.
It'll be years before actual quantum computers exist. Right now they implement them using NMR machines and they're only able to realize a handfull of qbits. So unless you want your desktop machine to double as an MRI machine quantum computing just isn't going to be cost effective for decades (if ever).
One unintended side effect of the QC has been that answers started to show up before questions were put in. Researchers are investigating, but suspect they already know the answer...
and still waiting for duke nukem forever. ;)
for a minute there, i lost myself...
-God doesn't play dice with the universe, putz.
Having just finished a class in Quantum computing I have these observations:
1) Right now most of these quantum 'circuits' are implemented on NMR machines. They can realize a handfull of qubits. Not very cost effective. Unless you want your computer to double as an MRI machine (hey, you could rent it out every night!) it's not going to cost effective any time soon.
2) Quantum Cellular Automata (QCA) - not strictly quantum computing, but a very interesting and potentially realizable (as in they might actually be able to fabricate these in the next 10 years or so) computing paradigm. The big advantages over current logic families (like CMOS): there is no current flow hence the power dissipation could be miniscule. They switch at Terahertz rates. QCA circuits are very small ( a majority gate in less space than a current CMOS transistor).
3) Put the word 'Quantum' in front of something and it suddenly has a certain cachet.
For the time being, most of this stuff is fantasy. At most we can build actual quantum circuits (not simulated) which have maybe 10 gates or so which isn't too useful and the implementation technology is extremely expensive (not to mention large and power hungry). QCAs may actually lead to something real - but they're not really quantum gates.
I hereby recommend when Quantum clusters come out we call them :
Grendel Clusters!
Obscure joke I know but hey, I'm a geek....
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
Damn you Quantum Computing! Your seemingly random results have cost me everything!
Say we do take a qbit and we just look at it from time to time, since it can be any number at any given time, can this be used to generate truly random numbers, just set up a qc and check qbits from a function's output that allows for an equal probability of getting the right state?
/obligatory quote for future generations to laugh at.
If only we had STARTED with Grendel clusters.... ;-)
I suppose we could call them Gilgamesh Clusters instead.
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
All the processing power in the world doesn't change the answer: 101010
But maybe a system like that could spit out 42 a little quicker than my old dual celeron.
How can this benefit the pr0n industry?
or a dupe post about it.
I always thought of Creationism as the Raving Right's version of the Loony Left's Anthropogenic Global Warming-brightmal
http://www.node99.org/projects/qa/
It's geared towards the architecture aspects of quantum computers, with a gentle intro to the physics behind it.... what do you call computer circuits which are constructed from quantum dots? I thought that's what "quantum computing" was but I guess I'm wrong. Is that just really really tiny regular computing?
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
Simulated quantum computer in the InterNet
Fraunhofer Institut for computer architecture and software technology ( ROOFRIDGE ) placed a quantum computer simulator on-line accessible by Webbrowser . The simulated machine can with up to 31 Qubits so mentioned work and is help to develop new algorithms and circuits for quantum computers.
Technical details of the hard and software describe the scientists in a detailed essay on the Website. Behind the simulation by Myrinet a coupled Linux cluster with altogether 56 GByte puts main memories.
Quantum computers are able to solve computing problems very fast at those conventional computers the teeth break off themselves -- for example the factorizing of very large numbers. They can do that, because they work with Qubits so mentioned instead of with bits. A Qubit takes both binary conditions at the same time; an arithmetic operation at a register from Qubits affects therefore all values at the same time. Each selection of the result destroys however the simultaneousness (or superposition) and reduces it to only one value.
Therefore hardware is, which can manipulate the sensitive Qubits, it however on the other hand as well as possible before the destructive external world influences protects for material quantum computers necessarily on the one hand. On the other hand completely new algorithms are necessary, with which the final result contains to a certain extent all solutions. One of it is the factorizing algorithm of Shor .
Look at Ape by Shane Hathaway. SQLStorage
is a hack in Archetypes that is interesting.
Zope can use RDBMS storages without a problem -
the problem is reconciling the RDBMS/OODBMS
paradigm.
just went to the site, and i'm like
...
...
"DUH? dude, what's this good for?"
and the demo isn't working...
maybe all this quantum stuff is for people who
have "step over the edge of the looking glass"
and have reached a meta-meta state of a way to
view the world and now are just plain bored
well people, i'm still working on my "seashell-
magnet" based-radar.
"just a thought"
It depends entirely on the particular RNG you are using.
From man 3 rand:
(emphasis mine)
So:
HAND.
From tha wikipedia article: Because of decoherence, a quantum computer running at around 1 kelvin will fail after about one nanosecond.
I didn't know that AMD sold quantum computers.
NP Complete, NP Hard, and similar problems in polynomial time. 'nuff said ;)
Why would anyone need this technique to "teleport" someone? Is a carbon atom in my eye not close enough to any other carbon atom? Why must a "copy" of me somewhere require the exact quantum states to be the same?
If I follow a blueprint closely enough, with extreme detail, using a scale that measures to 6 decimal places, lets say, can't I produce a "clone" of my car that is "close enough" to the original that it basically _is_ the original, (assuming yet to be designed and more accurate manufactoring techniques, etc.)?
We don't know how "low" our neural nets go - would someone seem or feel different if the quantum of states of the atoms in their brain cells were different?
To clone a human body would require an accurate body scan, down to the atom, and some way of reproducing it - to me, this is highly unlikely. What's much more likely, is that humans will interface with artificial constructs whereby we can transfer our "software". This software can be then be "beamed" to "disposable" bodies in other places.
That seems to me to be be most likely way of going somewhere, without actually going there, if that makes sense.