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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!
The algorithm in psuedo-code:
int qbit[32];
for ( i = 0; i < 32; i++ )
qbit[i] = (rand() >>30) & 0x01;
Nice rack, seriously. Clean, uncluttered.
Since power and probably complexity to program increases exponentially.
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
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
But how many frames per second will you get playing Duke Nukem Forever on it?
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?
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
Sorry, if you just imagine playing Duke Nukem Forever, you collapse it into a wave function and the game never gets finished.
Or something. Look, a monkey!
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.
... is develop a quantum algorithm that can handle a decent amount of slashdoters!
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.
3) You should always use high order bits from a RNG.
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!
What I can explain without too much trouble is that the cluster is merely emulating the abilities of a quantum computer. A quantum computer, conversely, would be incapable of matching the performance of, say, seti@home on all of those machines. Emulation is taxing on any system - just ask the people who are using PearPC on their brand spankin' new computers only to get sub-G3 performance out of OS X.
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.
... welcome our new simulated q-bit overlords.
for a minute there, i lost myself...
"A "PC" that just scrapes Longhorn's requirements."
Giggle giggle, snort snort. We're so good at recycling other people's jokes, I wonder why none of us have girlfriends?
"Derp de derp."
It computes really fast as long as you don't actually want the answer.
--- Ban humanity.
A 31-bit QC can accomplish in a few instructions what takes this mainframe several hours.
- C
a sarcastic slashdot reader... you must be a killer with the ladies...
Cruise TT
"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
> (which is, of course, impossible).
"If you've done six impossible things this morning, why not round it off with breakfast at Millway's, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe?"
'nuff said.
This is not a sig
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...
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.
Damn you Quantum Computing! Your seemingly random results have cost me everything!
Is that the one where she gives you the root password to her home computer?
No, that's where you finger her box, grep a couple times, and then you stream into a secure tunnel. And if you're feeling particularly nasty, you can look for a trojan and go through the back door.
Quantum computing will never be useful in graphics... because each qubit only ever results in a single bit of information. Even with an unthinkably powerful 1000 qubit computer, one computation is going to result in at most 1000 bits of image.
Quantum computing is useful when you have problems which are very hard even for short answers... like the travelling salesperson problem.
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 .
Oh wait, that's cuz its running Windows Quantum Edition.
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