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Lockheed Martin Purchases First Commercial Quantum Computer

Posted by Unknown on from the yes-no-maybe-so dept.

Panaflex writes "D-Wave systems announced general availability for its 128 qubit adiabatic quantum machine just two weeks ago, and reports of its first sale to Lockheed Martin have come out." The D-Wave Systems site has a rather informative collection of quantum computing papers.

3 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. So, how long has the NSA had one? by pestie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So, can this thing crack all non-quantum encryption, then? I seem to remember reading about how that would only require 32 qubits or so. And whether it can or can't, if commercial offerings have come this far, how long has the NSA had a version that can crack all encryption?

    1. Re:So, how long has the NSA had one? by MaskedSlacker · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I really should have specified "all encryption based on multiplying two large primes," since that's the vast majority of commercially-significant encryption

      No it isn't. It's public/private key encryption. Symmetric key ciphers (which are far more significant) rely on a variety of algorithms. The main use of public/private key is for exchanging symmetric keys.

      In short, RSA (and similar) would be useless, but AES (and similar) would remain secure. The real problem would become one of securely exchanging symmetric keys.

  2. Re:Hold the freaking phone by blueg3 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Adiabatic quantum computing is somewhat different from "regular" quantum computing. Also, places like Slashdot don't get every minor update to the state of the art. Might have something to do with all the people who say, "wake me up when there's a commercially-available version of this." Well, here's your commercially-available version of this.