D-Wave Demos Quantum Computer
Link: D-Wave Demos Quantum Computer
Canadian start-up, D-Wave, demonstrated its quantum computer - ‘Orion’ - at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, this week.
The company hopes to be ready to sell time on the computer to major institutions, by the first quarter of 2008.
Quantum computers, which have never yet existed outside of the laboratory, are fundamentally different from electronic computers.
Orion is based on a silicon chip which houses 16 quantum bits or ‘qubits’, the equivalent of a storage bit in a conventional computer. The qubits, which are connected to each other, consists of dots of the element niobium surrounded by coils of wire.
Qubits are the equivalent of the 1s and 0s used by digital computers. A qubit must be either a 1 or a 0 - however, it can go one stage further than a digital bit by taking on the 0 or 1 state at the same time.
This is achieved by taking a pair of superconductors - aluminum and niobium - and cooling them close to absolute zero. At this temperature the metals take on the properties that allow them to hold the 1 and 0 state simultaneously.
D-Wave hopes that by 2008 it will have a 512-qubit system, and it expects to further advance to a 1,024-qubit system by the end of that year.
A major advantage of quantum computers is their ability to solve much larger problems than electronic computers can handle, at much faster speeds.
They also require substantially less energy to run. Niobium is a superconductor and therefore does not radiate heat. The chip itself requires only a few nanowatts. The refrigeration unit consumes 20 kilowatts of power, but compared to most server farms this is minimal.
