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Under the Hood of Quantum Computing
nanotrends writes "Gordie Rose, the CTO of Dwave Systems, the venture funded company that plans to offer paid use of a superconducting quantum computer starting in 2007, reveals secrets of his quantum computer construction. It is based on nobium superconducting 'circuits of atoms' and is not RSFQ. (Rapid Single Flux quantum)."
I read the article, but it didn't make it very clear - what will be the advantages of paid use of their quantum computer? Unless it's going to be faster than other supercomputers, I can't see the point. Is there some other advantage I'm not aware of?
I'd be very suprised if their quantum computer will be faster than conventional computers by next year. 20 years away, maybe.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
Any investors interested in my zero-point energy project? Come and bring all your capital, buwahahaha.
Yes.. but will it run linux?
--AlexC
Just because I dont agree with climate change doesnt make me a troll
I plan to build a quantum computer in my mind.
Can I make a Beowulf Cluster of those Quantum computers ?
What a load of rubbish. Quantum computinf is nowhere near the level where it is useful for anything, let alone for building a supercomputer out of it.
I just read the FA, and it makes only a token mention of quantum computing at the end. It seems to be a (very simple) discussion of using a superconductor to make faster transistors.... What have I missed here?
Wow, they use quantum mechanics? Every chemical reaction in our universe uses quantum mechanics; they couldn't be more vague if they tried. They're clearly trying to capitalize on the 'quantum computer' buzz.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
A functional quantum computer? Really?
I used to be a undergrad lab assistant. I never worked in quantum computing, but our neighbours were some of these guys. I picked up a few things, one of those things being that quantum computing is hard.
Classical computers use the laws of classical physics to operate. Classical physics is deterministic, and that's how we want our classical computers to behave. As the chip and die sizes get smaller and smaller (what are we at now, 65nm?) CPUs are more likely to suffer from quantum effects, but AFAIK there's circutry in there to compensate for that. Error checking.
A quantum computer is just a machine that uses the laws of quantum mechanics rather than the laws of classical mechanics to operate. The advantage is that some algorithms, when implemented on a quantum computer, are 2n instead of n^2. I never really understood this, maybe a better physicist will come along and explain it. Anyway, to build a quantum computer one needs two things:
- (a) You need some Quantum bits (qbits) to store data
- (b) You need to get those bits to interact with each other in some fashion
There are many approaches to building a quantum computer. One guy (Raymond Laflamme) has a bunch of different atoms that are different elements all in the same molecule, those interact with each other but he has only developed the ability to read / write to about 5 different qbits. I read about another guy on Slashdot here who made a giant array of qbits using atoms in a laser trap. That gets you a lot of qbits, but they don't interact at all. There are many approaches.
Anyway, the reason I think Dwave Systems is full of bullshit is that any approach thus far is good at (a) or (b), but not both. Someone who got a powerful quantum computer up and running would most assuredly win a Nobel Prize. Also, why the hell would he need to woo venture capital? I know I'm up in Canada, but I'm sure most governments are throwing scads and scads of research money at Quantum computing. Answer? Venture capitalists are more naive.
If there's anything I learned from here, it's that a lot of Con artists use buzzwords to try and justify their woo-woo science. "Quantum" is one of them.
Smart money on this guy being a fraud.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
I was wondering which one is the best candidate for Quantum computing. -Metal (superconductor) based -Optical quantum computer
BTW all circuits on the lowest level are "quantum" circuits, so maybe he's just trying to pass off his Packard-Bell 66MHz PC as a quantum computer?
From what has been described on the blog and website, i'm not convinced that what they're working on is much more than simply a superconducting RSFQ - Rapid Single Flux Quantum - chip, which although can concievably run at a breakneck speed compared to todays Silicon CPU's, is not a Quantum Computer in the normal sense. This thing isn't going to run Shor's Algorithm. Also, i'm surprised to notice that there are people here who still consider QCs as science fiction - they're not. Quantum Computing has been practical in the lab since the 90's - and, for example, composite numbers have been factorised in polynomial time. The challenge faced by QCT research groups around the world at present is mainly building the things with a large number of qubits, and still maintaining successful operation. With regards to solid state devices such as the Kane QC model, one of the approaches being investigated involves building multiple small QCs and interconnecting them via conventional microelectronics - perhaps SETs, RSFQs, spintronics or maybe even plain old silicon microelectronics - to create a useful, many-qubit, computer.
As a physicist who had courses in Quantum Computation I had to vomit when I just read the Title Superconducting Quantum Computer.
There are only two Quantum Algorithms with applications in real live AFAIK Shor's factoring Algorithm to find the Prime Factors of a number in polynomial time, and a boosted search algorithm, which gives a \sqrt(O) speed boost. The largest number Shor's Algorithm could be used on is 15. And it won't be usefull before we reach 16 bit's or so (which we won't in my lifetime with any of the approaches discussed today). The larges stable aray of qubits is 8 AFAIK, and you cannot do anything with those so far everybody is just working on stbility and prooves of concept.
1) Hence there is no usefull quantum computer in existence. Anyone who want's to sell you one is a liar.
Superconductivity, is well known and not very hard to achieve. I can make pretty much any material superconducting if you just give me a liquid Helium 3/4 demixer. So once I have a working quantum computer, I can add some lead, empty a bottle of Liquid Helium over it, and claim, that I have a super conducting Quantum computer. To be fair it's often inherent in the design of a Quantum computer that it needs to be very cold. But it doesn't always need to be so. But what remains is
2) Saying a quantum computer is superconducting doesn't add any infomation about the usefullness of such a device.
So what could this headline mean:
Someone allows you to use his NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) device if you give him money.
(NMR is standard in todays chemistry labs, and very simple useless quantum algorithms (see "Deutsch algorithm") have been implemented with it.)
Where is the beef? Can an article still be kicked out at this stage?
I paraphrase:
"extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"
Yet another under construction web page and half baked idea. I pity the investors. And remember what Feynman said (which is still true today):
"No one understands quantum mechanics"
Which does not keep us from using the results of a a highly successful theory, but just keep in mind, wave function computing is not going to be easy, but I believe it is possible. And I should know, I'm made of atoms.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
I think this statement is incorrect. My understanding concurs with what is written in the wiki article:
and
This is utter nonsense. Either the company is a front for something else, or their public relations department needs to be executed at dawn. For example - a quote from the article:
"Whenever anyone says 'superconductor' just think 'really cold metal' "
This is just garbage. A superconductor does not have to be metallic (some of the best are actually ceramics) and cold metal does not necessarily have zero resistance.
I find the very notion of quantam computing so complex that just reading the article's title made my head explode. Luckily there was a quantam wormhole within my skull that reassembled my head and brain, with no side effects whatsoever!
I like stories.
"Historically arguments for metal-based processors have been that (1) since they're made out of superconductors, they generate much less heat than conventional processors (true); (2) for some technical reasons you can operate at clock speeds up to about 100 GHz without alot of problems (true); so if you want a really fast, really low power processor, here's a way to do it."
Ok, sure you've got a low power CPU but what about the massive amounts of energy expended to keep it at absolute zero? This doesn't sound very practical to me. Maybe a physicist can shed some light on recent cooling advances that I'm not aware of...
ConsultingFair.com
If you assess the capabilities of the system, it disappears!
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
Niobium.
A missing i, do you see?
Nobium on the other hand is a gift to those who like knob jokes.
The Anonymous Chemistry Spelling Nazi
I came across some simulator... http://www.senko-corp.co.jp/qcs/ patched SetModifiedFlag (MFC) so you can simulate own circuits 00018030: 8B 31 (old and new value) 00018031: 44 C0 00018032: 24 90 00018033: 04 90 "Nag"screens removal 000011A0: 6A C3 00001470: 6A C3 Note that these patches still don't allow to save to a file but it's at least something.
Actually, it would mean that QP = NP. This is considered more likely than P = NP, but as with P=?NP no one has yet shown it to be true or false.
Ben Hocking
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The summary is waaaaay off base, as there are no "under the hood" details (except to identify a single construction material). Also no real claim of quantum computing is made.
Caveat Utilitor
This device won't work. I won't bother giving my reasons. Can someone tell me how I can convert this knowledge into some kind of bet on a market that will make me money? It seems I ought to be able to use this knowledge somehow.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Just a guess. Given the article, one can't do anything other than guess. I think this may be a conventional computer using superconducting technology, not a 'quantum computer' as the term is usually understood. It seems to be expected that a superconducting computer -- if one can be built -- might clock an order of magnitude faster than conventional semiconductor based computers As I understand it, today's supercomputers are little if any faster than Best Buy's $300 special of the week. They just have a huge number of CPUs hooked up in parallel (I'm sure that if I have that wrong, someone will point out that I'm a total moron).
Where does quantum computing come in? Looks to me like it doesn't exactly. My impression is that when you dink around with superconductivity, you need to understand and allow for quantum mechanical effects. That's all the article claims to do as far as I can see.
So, can they build this wonder? Possibly, but my guess is that they can't. AFAIK, no one else has demonstrated or shipped a real, functioning, superconducting computer. I'm dubious that an outfit that needs to send out what are probably misleading press releases will be the first. But I've been wrong before.
As for quantum computing. It's surely going to look like black magic to me, and, I strongly suspect, most other folks. I can sort of vaguely understand how (all?) the possible solutions to an operation can be computed simultaneously and held in a quantum device. I don't have clue how one knows which answer is the desired answer.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Why would you use a superconducter to make a transisitor? The point of a transistor is to have resistance. Voltage over a certain amount will be able to pass the transistor. That equals a 1. Voltage that's under the threshold does not pass.... that equals a 0.
Superconductors have 0 resistance so you might as well not even have a transistor... It's always gonna be a 1.
an old linux overlord cluster of these in soviet russia! (YOU compute they!)
This article is total crap. IAAP (figure it out) in the field of spin based electronics, closely aligned with efforts to develop qc. As described in the article, these circuits are not quantum bits. Nb metal that is held at low temp will enter the so called "ground state" of the material where all electrons are in a single state. Great. you have a macroscopic quantum state. Problem is that superconducting states do not exist outside of the superconducting metal. in fact they have a region of "normal state" i.e. non-superconducting electrons that forms a small skin on the outside of the material. This is mostly the result of disorder in the material, thermal fluctuations etc. This means that if you hare trying to create 2 q-bits in this way, you will have trouble "coupling" them together. if there is no coupling, no information transfer, no interaction, and no "computation". Building q-bits is easy, anyone can do it. Coupling q-bits and controling that coupling interaction is the hard part. superconducting states cannot couple to each other if they are discrete disconnected structures. This article is total bs. inverstors beware.
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx? id=14591&ch=infotech
Computers have infiltrated nearly every field of business and science, and they keep getting faster. Nonetheless, researchers routinely encounter problems impossible for even the most powerful supercomputers to solve. The remedy could be quantum computers, which would use the fantastic properties of quantum mechanics to crack such problems in seconds rather than centuries. Since the 1980s, physicists in academic labs and at firms such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and NEC have pursued a variety of quantum computing approaches, but none seems likely to deliver a working machine in less than 10 years.
Company: D-Wave Systems
Headquarters: Vancouver, British Columbia
Amount invested: $22 million Canadian (about $17.5 million U.S.)
Lead investor: Draper Fisher Jurvetson
Key founders: Geordie Rose, Alexandre Zagoskin, Bob Wiens, Haig Farris
Technology: Quantum computers
Vancouver startup D-Wave Systems, however, aims to build a quantum computer within three years. It won't be a fully functional quantum computer of the sort long envisioned; but D-Wave is on track to produce a special-purpose, "noisy" piece of quantum hardware that could solve many of the physical-simulation problems that stump today's computers, says David Meyer, a mathematician working on quantum algorithms at the University of California, San Diego.
The difference between D-Wave's system and other quantum computer designs is the particular properties of quantum mechanics that they exploit. Other systems rely on a property called entanglement, which says that any two particles that have interacted in the past, even if now spatially separated, may still influence each other's states. But that interdependence is easily disrupted by the particles' interactions with their environment. In contrast, D-Wave's design takes advantage of the far more robust property of quantum physics known as quantum tunneling, which allows particles to "magically" hop from one location to another.
Incorporated in April 1999, D-Wave originated as a series of conversations among students and lecturers at the University of British Columbia. Over the years, it has amassed intellectual property and narrowed its focus, while attracting almost $18 million in funding, initially from angel investors and more recently from the Canadian and German governments, and from venture capital firms. The company plans to complete a prototype device by the end of 2006; a version capable of solving commercial problems could be ready by 2008, says president and CEO Geordie Rose.
The aggressiveness of D-Wave's timetable is made possible by the simplicity of its device's design: an analog chip made of low-temperature superconductors. The chip must be cooled to -269 C with liquid helium, but it doesn't require the delicate state-of-the-art lasers, vacuum pumps, and other exotic machinery that other quantum computers need.
The design is also amenable to the lithography techniques used to make standard computer chips, further simplifying fabrication. D-Wave patterns an array of loops of low-temperature superconductors such as aluminum and niobium onto a chip. When electricity flows through them, the loops act like tiny magnets. Two refrigerator magnets will naturally flip so that they stick together, minimizing the energy between them. The loops in D-Wave's chip behave similarly, "flipping" the direction of current flow from clockwise to counterclockwise to minimize the magnetic flux between them. Depending on t
''It is based on nobium superconducting 'circuits of atoms'''
...
I dont know what nobium is, i hoped it was based on niobium
It is all in the title
This smells vaguely like vaporware. At least none of the speakers at this years or last years Spin and Qubit conference seemed nearly as optimistic as these guys, even though there were several top notch people (and last year the focus was VERY much quantum computing).
In any case, the technology that comes to mind when I hear "very cold superconducting niobium quantum computer" is Josephson junctions. There's an article on it here.
What people does DWave have? What have they published previously?
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
They've put up a paper on their techniques. And judging from the pictures, they do something that looks like serious research. Interesting. Apparently they're after quantum chemical computations.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
There appear to be various kinds of "quantum computers", and this seems to cause a certain amount of confusion.
Your post implicitly refers to QCs that employ quantum entanglement and have a large number of qbits. D-Wave's system doesn't.
Instead, it seems to use Cooper pair amplification in a bulk superconductor to allow atomic-scale quantum effects like tunnelling to be manipulated at the macroscopic level. In effect this provides a large handle by which to poke tiny stuff. (:P)
The real question is, what kind of "tiny stuff" can be "poked" and what kinds of computer solutions does this enable. Well, D-Wave has identified some potential applications, and indeed they are pretty important ones which might earn them gazillions. But your factorization example is not one of them.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
When they come up with a quantum torpedo, I'll listen...
It sounds like this process would be a lot easier to create the quantum computing effect and substain it. Given the amazing promises that quantum computers offer, I can't help but get exicted. I hope that they continue to deliver on their promises. The future is so exicting.
They call me....Tim??!
If you're not a moron, you can see that it isn't really a quantum computer at all. Just fake advertisements. Talk to any professor- Quantum computing MAY be possible in around 200 years or so.
to build a working Quantum Computer until 2007. It would be a nice surprise, actually....
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c ience/QuantumComp.html, http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.210 503), but it is unlikely that any quantum computer will provide cheaper computing power for NP-hard problems than the cell processor until quite a while from now. In my personal opinion and also the opinion of some other people which i talked to is that the timescale for that is something like 10-15years of intense research.
As a small disclaimer: I work in QC field. There are a few approaches to building a superconducting quantum computer, but there are not many experiments coupling even two Qubits. One paper discussing one of the few experiments which worked is:
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=author:%22Pas
But there are severe problems with superconducting qubits, namely that the quality of the insulators used in standard processes are not good enough for building a working QC right now.
(http://eiffel.ps.uci.edu/cyu/publications/qubit.
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.95.21
It's not that these fundamental problems could not be adressed by developing better insulators or using other approaches
(http://www.solid.phys.ethz.ch/wallraff/content/s
But indeed, superconductors are one of the best candidates (others: atom traps etc.).
The role of D-Wave is that they are trying to push the development of superconducting QC to something which can be sold or where at least the patents can be sold. So it is natural (and probably good) that the external represantation on what they got is optimistic. But maybe it is important to point out to the slashdot readers that the blog of the CEO of a company is for sure an optimistic assumption what the future may hold and not the full criticism imposed by a peer-review in a scientific journal........
Another thing which makes it difficult to assess what they got is that D-Wave is usually pretty uninformative about what their specific plans are. Thats understandable because they spend a lot of money (for a company) into something where they will get out patents which would be weakened by prior art if they talk to loud.
Well, if you can switch between superconductivity and normal conductivity (maybe even with a large resistance in the non-superconducting state state), then it would make sense, I didn't RTFA, but I could imagine that this is possible by creating a magnetic field at the superconducting wire (large enough magnetic fields make superconductance break down). Then you could have e.g. superconducting state = no resistance = no voltage on the wire = 0, and normal conducting state = resistance = voltage on the wire = 1. Or alternatively, superconductance = no resistance = high current through the wire = 1, normal conductance = resistance = low current through the wire = 0.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It's a private company.
Those probabilities should be a^2, b^2, and so forth. Seems slashdot doesn't like alt-0178.
I opened the hood of my quantum computer, and all I found was a cat and some guy who kept asking for Wigner. I'm thinking of getting my money back.
How do you know that under the hood is the right place to look?
... I can say definitely, YES!
Paul B.
Check out the sidebar under "Published Stuff", especially this link... Next objection, please...
Paul B.
Congratulations! You've just invented the earliest attempt to build superconductive electronics (SCE), dating back to late 50s, or something -- quantrons these gates were called (I think, way before my time...), controllable by neighboring magnetic fields and using SC/non-SC to distinguish between ``1'' and ``0''.
In early 60s Brian Josephson discovered interesting properties of what became to be known a Josephson junction, a tunnel barrier between two SC which would be superconducting or normal depending on the current one attempts to pass through it. The next SCE family was called "latching logic" -- switch some on, some off, and they remain in this state for as long as you are providing the bias current. Basis for 80s IBM SCE supercomputer project.
(R)SFQ is based on a similar kind of sufficiently shunted Josephson junction, which would not stay in resistive state, but resulting currents (or absence of them) in SC loops can be interpreted as ones or zeros. According to some accounts, ``R'' stands for "Russian", though originally it was "resistive", then "rapid".
Finally, when you use JJs in a SC loop and use the fact that you (nor Nature) have no clue which direction the current flows, you get superconducting quantum computing...
Paul B.
Creative financial advisor sought.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Just in case you need to see the true state of this qbit-technology visit http://www.atomchip.com/ and http://www.atomchip.org/ for your reading pleasure. Sure worked for me.
free dom(inion) - free energy - free your mind - whee!
when i first heard about quantum computing, i figured they were trying to move from a binary to a ternary system: on, off, and maybe.
I've seen the term QP used before at a quantum computing seminar. I certainly didn't coin it. There is a very important distinction between P and QP - namely that QP is, as you guessed, a polynomial time algorithm on a quantum computer. Google on "Quantum Polynomial" and NP if you want more info. Here's a link that Google Scholar turned up, as well (I haven't read it, but it sounds interesting - judging from the title it seems they are claiming that QP=NP): http://scholar.google.com/url?sa=U&q=http://arxiv. org/abs/quant-ph/9908080
Ben Hocking
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All NP problems are verifiable in P. So, although probability does still factor in (because in many situations there's a significant chance the correct answer won't come up), you can verify you have the right answer in P.
Ben Hocking
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As I recall, the travelling salesperson algorithm (I assume this is what you meant by TSP) can be converted to a satisfiability problem in polynomial time. Furthermore, it is trivial to verify the satisfiability problem in polynomial time. Are you arguing that TSP cannot be converted to SAT (or 3-SAT, as is usually done) in P, or that 3-SAT is not verifiable in P?
Ben Hocking
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All machines are mechanical in nature. Machines are metal. Current needs to run to the Atoms. Data needs to be input to the Atoms. Shape takes place. Reworld small scale applications are tested.