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!
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
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!
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...
Noah constructed a supercomputer called "The Ark" that was composed of 300 qubits by 50 qubits by 30 qubits, or 450,000 cubic qubits.
Hmmm... sounds like the basis for some cheesy sci-fi - kind of like a matrix, but to protect minds from some psycho-viral plague.
Inconceivable!
> (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...
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.