Room temperature quantum computing
By Scott Hamilton
Senior Expert Emerging Technologies
Quantum computing is among the latest technologies that is meant to change the world through the vast improvement of computer science. Quantum computers will allow researchers to model chaotic systems like quantum mechanical systems that tell us how atoms interact with each other at the subatomic level to form chemical bonds. Researcher have been working to develop a quantum computer since the idea was first mentioned by Stephen Wiesner in a paper on conjugate coding in 1968. In 1980 Pauil Benioff described the concepts of quantum information theory which is the baseline of modern quantum computers. The biggest problem facing the industry was the extreme cold temperature at near absolute zero required to keep a quantum system stable made modern quantum computers mostly giant freezers with a tiny processors in the center of them. A few weeks ago a new announcement changed the outlook on quantum computer forever.
Scientists at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth Australia announced a room temperature quantum computer was in the last stages of development and is expected to be installed in their facilities later the year. Unlike the competing products in the spectrum the device is said to be around the size of a lunchbox and does not need the room sized refrigeration units that are both costly and bulky.
The Australian National University invented the ground breaking technology and are the driving force behind the new company Quantum Brilliance that is seeking to commercialize the product. The partnership between Quantum Brilliance and the Pawsey Centre bring Austrilia to the forefront in bleeding edge quantum applications which impact broad areas of computer science.
The technology is based off the concept of utilizing a nitrogen vacancy in the center of manufactured diamonds to store quantum information controlled by beams of light. The technology is very resilient to thermal vibrations and magnetic impulses giving it some of the longest coherence times of any solid-state electron spin information storage device at room temperature.
The low size, weight and power consumption of the device makes it the perfect accelerator as it can be installed along side conventional computing hardware much like the Nvidia Graphic Processing Units can be used to accelerate matrix operations the Quantum Brilliance accelerators can be used to accelerate quantum mechanics and quantum computing algorithms right in the comfort of your own office or data center.
According the http://www.quantumbrilliance.com the initial release devices are commerically available immediately from their website allowing interested parties to begin hosting quantum hardware today. They have partner with three outstanding research institutes in the development f their technology.
The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Australia, a world renowned computing research facility. The Fraunhofer Institute in Germany, one of the leading high performance computing and artificial intelligence research institutes in the world, and of course Australian National University where to heart and soul of the project was born. These three institutes combined have been involved in a bulk of the high performance computing research of the last several decades so it is not surprising to me for the next generation of ground breaking computing hardware is coming from their combined efforts. I would love to get my hands on the technology, though I am still not sure what I could possibly do with it.
Until next week stay safe and learn something new.
Scott Hamilton is a Senior Expert in Emerging Technologies at ATOS and can be reached with questions and comments via email to scott.hamilton@atos.net or through his website at http://www.techshepherd.tk.
