Quantum Computing Leap
02.08.07 - 10:02pm
Let me start this off by saying I have my fingers, toes, eyes, and limbs crossed in hopes that this is true. A relatively small and new company, D-Wave, has announced that they have successfully built a 16 qubit quantum computer and they will be performing a live demonstration via link this upcoming Tuesday. Quantum computing takes computing to a new level enabling the manipulation of the qubits such that the solution simply exists once the question is entered into the system. Unlike traditional computers, quantum computers will potentially make all mathematical problems (read computer problems like protein modeling) a trivial computation with it’s ability to work on enormous quantities of data in relatively little time. D-Wave seems to have a small amount of information on their quantum computer but I really hope that this is true.
Quantum What?
Prior to hearing this news I had very little knowledge about quantum computing asides from the understanding that it works with molecules in a 3D space and held the key to the vast majority of computation problems. Once I read the news clip I did a little research and it seems like quantum computing is no small manner. Everyone who is anyone has someone working on either the theories or the physical implementation of a quantum computer and there have been some advances but nothing on the scale of D-Wave’s Orion computer. The base units in a quantum computer are called qubits and serve the same function as bits within a traditional computer. The number of qubits present determine the amount of data that the processor can crunch, similar to how many bits a traditional computer can crunch. The current lines of processors from AMD and Intel are capable of 64 bit computation, D-Wave’s Orion is only capable of operating on 16 qubits however this is an enormous jump from all previous working prototypes. While I am not confident enough to write on exactly how quantum computers manipulate the qubits, Wikipedia has a great entry that’ll get your mind whirling.
So once again, nobody else has verified that D-Wave has a functioning quantum computer and we won’t know until Tuesday at the earliest but this could be huge, enormous even. I would love to see this in person, just the cooler used to keep this chip at the 5 micro-Kelvin operating temperature is a site to see. For those of you that don’t know, 0 Kelvin is absolute zero, the coldest you can get. So 5 mK is just a hair above that. The pictures that D-Wave has released are quite stunning and makes me believe they are the real thing, now only time will tell. By the way did I mention that if they get a functioning quantum computer working with enough qubits it’ll phase out all encryption algorithms. Yeah, scary huh? But it’ll help cure cancer fast as hell. Now it is time to start building the multi-core fission powerplant to operate the cooling devices for a small cluster of these.
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