Randy Boswell
Sun
Qubit chip the world’s fastest, Burnaby developer claims. Photograph by : CanWest News Service
A Burnaby company that claims to have built the world’s first marketable “quantum computer” — a hyper-fast data processor touted by the firm’s founder as potentially “the most significant invention of our generation” — has the global high-tech community buzzing ahead of its scheduled unveiling next week in California.
D-Wave Systems, a hardware developer headed by 34-year-old theoretical physicist Geordie Rose, has issued an open invitation to all technophiles to become “an eye witness to history” at the live-link, Feb. 13 launch of the company’s “16-qubit” Orion supercomputer. 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.
The additional brainpower afforded by a quantum system — which could make calculations exponentially faster than conventional computers — has been hailed by Rose as a “blueprint” for future computers.
The concept of quantum computing is that multiple calculations are carried out simultaneously in many “parallel universes” inside the microscopic circuitry within the central processor. Conventional computers typically handle calculations in sequence.
Rose has said the application of quantum mechanics to computing could be as big a human milestone as the change caused by the invention of the printing press — ushering in a new human era.
But experts are already duelling over the whether the machine will work.
“My gut instinct is that I doubt there is a major ‘free lunch’ here,” Oxford University physicist Andrew Steane told Britain’s Guardian newspaper Thursday. He described the prospect of a commercially viable quantum computer as akin to “claims of cold fusion.”
But Seth Lloyd, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told CanWest News Service on Thursday that D-Wave’s prototype — which is based on ideas Lloyd pioneered — “looks like a sensible, useful” application of the theory that could seriously kickstart the quantum age of computing.
“They’re not likely to demonstrate something unless they already know it’s going to work,” said Lloyd, noting that four-qubit processors have been tested successfully in laboratories.
Lloyd and one of his graduate students at MIT devised the “adiabatic” acceleration system, employed by D-Wave, that theoretically prevents a quantum computer from crashing under a deluge of data.
The computer’s critical components are 16 all-but-invisible micro-circuits made of niobium, a rare metal that has super-efficient, hyper-conductive properties when cooled to an extremely low temperature — nearly absolute zero, or -270 C.
The 16 quantum bits or “qubits” fit on a microchip smaller than the head of a pin. But the cooling solution for the computer — liquid helium — is held in a vault about the size of a large household freezer.
© The Vancouver Sun 2007
