.02 degrees above absolute zero, to be more precise… from the same wafer lot as the one that powers the world’s first commercial quantum computer.
The news just came out that D-Wave’s first customer is Lockheed Martin.
So cool !!!!!
Perfect, I am going to put one in my camera, adding more "quantum" in my photos, than I would have ever dreamed of even few years ago O=)
Low tech question;
what does the cooling (during manufacture I presume..) do/allow…?
I remember the excitement, and the skepticism at the launch in 2007 at the Computer Museum. It is so great to see that D-Wave is now achieving commercial success.
[http://www.flickr.com/photos/davidorban/389987506/]
Very interesting slides. It’s pretty clear that the "quantum" part is just a fraction of the effort required build a business around quantum computing.
I particularly like the offhand reference that the waste heat produced by the refrigerator is 10^10 (!) times the cooling power at the business end of the computer. (This is consistent with MRI superconducting magnets, which spend 50 kilowatts to remove 0.5 watts at 4.2K. And this D-Wave system runs 200x cooler).
Scaling up, that would require about half the USA electrical grid capacity to cool my laptop, or a truck-size generator to remove the waste heat produced by my wristwatch.
Gotta drop into these folks next time I’m in Burnaby.
"[..] This chip is certified to have been cooled to 20 degrees milli-Kelvin."
Since cryogenics is deemed to be an important feature of that quantum computing artifact, the punctilious me is somewhat annoyed that D-Wave’s PR copywriter managed to set in stone two stylistic faux pas:
• adding a superfluous "degrees" to kelvin
• capitalizing the unit name "kelvin"
And finally a move from Phys. Rev. B to the business lead in the NYT, and the second-most shared story for the day.
"if it performs as Lockheed and D-Wave expect, the design could be used to supercharge even the most powerful systems, solving some science and business problems millions of times faster than can be done today.
Ray Johnson, Lockheed’s chief technical officer, said his company would use the quantum computer to create and test complex radar, space and aircraft systems. It could be possible, for example, to tell instantly how the millions of lines of software running a network of satellites would react to a solar burst or a pulse from a nuclear explosion — something that can now take weeks, if ever, to determine.
“This is a revolution not unlike the early days of computing,” he said. “It is a transformation in the way computers are thought about.” Many others could find applications for D-Wave’s computers. Cancer researchers see a potential to move rapidly through vast amounts of genetic data. The technology could also be used to determine the behavior of proteins in the human genome, a bigger and tougher problem than sequencing the genome. Researchers at Google have worked with D-Wave on using quantum computers to recognize cars and landmarks, a critical step in managing self-driving vehicles.
Quantum computing has been a goal of researchers for more than three decades, but it has proved remarkably difficult to achieve.
The D-Wave computer that Lockheed has bought uses a different mathematical approach than competing efforts. In the D-Wave system, a quantum computing processor, made from a lattice of tiny superconducting wires, is chilled close to absolute zero. It is then programmed by loading a set of mathematical equations into the lattice.
The processor then moves through a near-infinity of possibilities to determine the lowest energy required to form those relationships. That state, seen as the optimal outcome, is the answer.
The approach, which is known as adiabatic quantum computing, has been shown to have promise in applications like calculating protein folding, and D-Wave’s designers said it could potentially be used to evaluate complicated financial strategies or vast logistics problems."
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