Tech world buzzing at the prospect of first commercial machines
Randy Boswell
Province
Dr. Geordie Rose in 2005. Photograph by : Jason Payne, The Province
A Burnaby company that claims to have built the world’s first marketable quantum computer — a hyper-fast data processor — has the global high-tech community buzzing ahead of the machine’s scheduled unveiling next week in California.
D-Wave Systems, a hardware developer headed by 34-year-old theoretical physicist Dr. Geordie Rose, has issued an open invitation to all technophiles to become “an eyewitness to history” at the live-link launch of the company’s “16-qubit” Orion supercomputer next Tuesday. And the demonstration of D-Wave’s “technological first” will take place at a site equal to the company’s portentous claims — the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Quantum computing devices promise to revolutionize research and development in a host of industries — biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and financial services among them — that rely on interpreting massive amounts of information and predicting scenarios through complex simulations or trial-and-error experiments. The additional brainpower afforded by a quantum system — which could make calculations exponentially faster than conventional, sequentially minded machines — has been hailed by
Rose as “a blueprint for how computers will be built in the future.”
“Quantum computing has been described as a system that allows calculations to occur simultaneously in a multitude of ‘parallel universes’ operating within the central processor’s microscopic circuitry,” Rose said in a 2005 Province interview.
“When you think of the world before electricity, before wireless communications, before humans harnessed fire or before the printing press, there were real differences before and after.
“We believe the type of machine that we’re building is going to usher in a new age.”
Seth Lloyd, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that
D-Wave’s prototype “looks like a sensible, useful” application of the theory that could seriously kickstart the quantum age of computing.
“But the proof of the pudding is in the eating,” he warned.
© The Vancouver Province 2007
