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Nasa buys into 'quantum' computer
The machine does not fit the conventional concept of a quantum computer, but makes use of quantum effects
Continue reading the main story
A $15m computer that uses "quantum physics" effects to boost its speed is to be installed at a Nasa facility.
It will be shared by Google, Nasa, and other scientists, providing access to a machine said to be up to 3,600 times faster than conventional computers.
Unlike standard machines, the D-Wave Two processor appears to make use of an effect called quantum tunnelling.
This allows it to reach solutions to certain types of mathematical problems in fractions of a second.
Effectively, it can try all possible solutions at the same time and then select the best.
Google wants to use the facility at Nasa's Ames Research Center in California to find out how quantum computing might advance techniques of machine learning and artificial intelligence, including voice recognition.
The gate model... is the single worst thing that ever happened to quantum computing”
Geordie Rose
Chief technology officer, D-wave
University researchers will also get 20% of the time on the machine via the Universities Space Research Agency (USRA).
Nasa will likely use the commercially available machine for scheduling problems and planning.
Canadian company D-Wave Systems, which makes the machine, has drawn scepticism over the years from quantum computing experts around the world.
Until research outlined earlier this year, some even suggested its machines showed no evidence of using specifically quantum effects.
Quantum computing is based around exploiting the strange behaviour of matter at quantum scales.
Most work on this type of computing has focused on building quantum logic gates similar to the gate devices at the basis of conventional computing.
But physicists have repeatedly found that the problem with a gate-based approach is keeping the quantum bits, or qubits (the basic units of quantum information), in their quantum state.
"You get drop out… decoherence, where the qubits lapse into being simple 1s and 0s instead of the entangled quantum states you need. Errors creep in," says Prof Alan Woodward of Surrey University.
One gate opens...
Instead, D-Wave Systems has been focused on building machines that exploit a technique called quantum annealing - a way of distilling the optimal mathematical solutions from all the possibilities.
Geordie Rose believes others have taken the wrong approach to quantum computing
Annealing is made possible by physics effect known as quantum tunnelling, which can endow each qubit with an awareness of every other one.
"The gate model... is the single worst thing that ever happened to quantum computing", Geordie Rose, chief technology officer for D-Wave, told BBC Radio 4's Material World programme.
"And when we look back 20 years from now, at the history of this field, we'll wonder why anyone ever thought that was a good idea."
Dr Rose's approach entails a completely different way of posing your question, and it only works for certain questions.
But according to a paper presented this week (the result of benchmarking tests required by Nasa and Google), it is very fast indeed at finding the optimal solution to a problem that potentially has many different combinations of answers.
In one case it took less than half a second to do something that took conventional software 30 minutes.
A classic example of one of these "combinatorial optimisation" problems is that of the travelling sales rep, who needs to visit several cities in one day, and wants to know the shortest path that connects them all together in order to minimise their mileage.
The D-Wave Two chip can compare all the possible itineraries at once, rather than having to work through each in turn.
Reportedly costing up to $15m, housed in a garden shed-sized box that cools the chip to near absolute zero, it should be installed at Nasa and available for research by autumn 2013.
US giant Lockheed Martin earlier this year upgraded its own D-Wave machine to the 512 qubit D-Wave Two.
source : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22554494
canggih giler computer ni..sampai aku xpaham macam mana dia berfungsi..Tapi yang pasti dengan perkembangan ni..program-program intelligent yang ambil masa yang lama untuk training and test..akan jadi cepat..
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Seven Things Google Might Do With a Quantum Computer
By Will Oremus | Posted Thursday, May 16, 2013, at 5:17 PM
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In theory, quantum computing could solve some problems exponentially faster than traditional computing.
agsandrew / shutterstock.com
Google and NASA are the proud new owners of a quantum computer, which they will use to launch an artificial-intelligence lab at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California. Google announced the initiative, called the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, in a blog post today: “Our goal: to study how quantum computing might advance machine learning.”
That sounds impressive. But what, exactly, does it mean?
As Greg Kuperberg explained in Future Tense last fall, a quantum computer is a new type of supercomputer that seeks to harness “quantum randomness” to perform operations far more efficiently traditional computers. The one Google and NASA bought was made by a company called D-Wave, and there is some debate about whether it’s really accurate to call it a quantum computer. Nonetheless, it recently solved at least one optimization problem 3,600 times faster than a conventional machine, raising the possibility that it could indeed lead to advances in machine learning.
That’s a big deal for Google, because machine-learning algorithms form the underpinning of the company’s most exciting new technologies. Basically, they’re procedures that allow computers not just to perform a specific set of predefined tasks, but to “learn” from their mistakes and user feedback and get better at those tasks over time—or even acquire the ability to perform new ones.
These algorithms are stunningly powerful, but they also tend to require massive computing power. For example, last year Google ran a cutting-edge machine-learning experiment in which computers learned to identify cats on YouTube—without being told in advance what cats looked like. That experiment required 16,000 computer processors running in parallel. As you can imagine, 16,000 processors are not going to fit onto your Android phone, let alone your Google Glass.
If Google can tap the theoretical power of quantum computing, those types of operations could get much easier. The company did not say precisely how it might use them in the real world. But off the top of my head, here are just a few of the Google technologies that could conceivably benefit from improved machine-learning algorithms:
Google Now, the mobile personal-assistant program that attempts to anticipate your needs
Self-driving cars
Google Goggles, which recognizes images like the Eiffel Tower when you point your phone’s camera at them
Search by Image
Voice Search
Google Prediction API
And, of course, good old Web search
That’s just for starters, though. For more ideas, check out Google’s vast caches of published research on machine learning and machine translation. Meanwhile, Google’s blog post alludes to quantum computing’s potential to tackle problems as far afield as protein folding and climate modeling. And who knows what NASA’s engineers might have in mind?
It’s possible that the D-Wave 2 will end up solving problems that Google and NASA haven’t even thought of yet. Or it might turn out to be a total bust. But that’s a luxury that both NASA and Google can afford, for different reasons. Here’s to moon shots. |
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tak lama lagi murah la ni.. boleh bwk pi lepak kedai mamak |
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Radzor posted on 18-5-2013 08:30 AM 
tak lama lagi murah la ni.. boleh bwk pi lepak kedai mamak
kalau guna teknologi ni..dah leh wat robot macam manusia terus rasanya..ehehe programming yang inspired dari biological beings macam neural network, genetic algorithm dah lama di implement..cuma masalah wat masa sekarang..untuk process akan amik masa yang amat lama..so xefficient untuk di buat robot yang boleh belajar dan sebagainya..kalau teknologi ni murah nanti..kita akan hidup macam citer irobot lah jawabnya..
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PITTSBURGH posted on 18-5-2013 09:10 AM
bsr gedabak ke
besar macam dalam gambar tu..yang box dwave belakang mamat berdiri tu rasanya..
ni web company dwave tu http://www.dwavesys.com
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D-Wave Sells First Quantum Computer
Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor
On Wednesday, D-Wave Systems made history by announcing the sale of the world's first commercial quantum computer. The buyer was Lockheed Martin Corporation, who will use the machine to help solve some of their "most challenging computation problems." Lockheed purchased the system, known as D-Wave One, as well as maintenance and associated professional services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
D-Wave One uses a superconducting 128-qubit (quantum bit) chip, called Rainier, representing the first commercial implementation of a quantum processor. An early prototype, a 16-qubit system called Orion, was demonstrated in February 2007. At the time, D-Wave was talking about future systems based on 512-qubit and 1024-qubit technology, but the 128-qubit Rainier turned out to be the company's first foray into the commercial market.
According to D-Wave co-founder and CTO Geordie Rose, D-Wave One, the technology uses a method called "quantum annealing" to solve discrete optimization problems. While that may sound obscure, it applies to all sorts of artificial intelligence-type applications such as natural language processing, computer vision, bioinformatics, financial risk analysis, and other types of highly complex pattern matching.
We asked Rose to describe the D-Wave system and the underlying technology in more detail.
HPCwire: In a nutshell, can you describe the machine and its construction?
Rose: The D-Wave One is built around a superconducting processor. The processor is shielded from noise using specialized filtering and shielding systems that ensure that the processor's environment is extremely quiet, and is cooled to almost absolute zero during operation. The entire system's footprint is approximately 100 square feet.
While there is a substantial amount of exotic technology inside the D-Wave One, the system has been built to require very little specialized knowledge to operate. Users interact with the system via an API that allows the D-Wave One to be accessed remotely from a variety of programming environments, including Python, Java, C++, SQL and MATLAB.
HPCwire: What is "quantum annealing?"
Rose: Quantum annealing is a prescription for solving certain types of hard computing problems. In order to run quantum annealing algorithms, hardware that behaves quantum mechanically — such as the Rainier processor in the D-Wave One — is required. Quantum annealing is conceptually similar to simulated annealing and genetic algorithms, but is much more powerful.
HPCwire: Can you prove that quantum computing is actually taking place?
Rose: This was the question we set out to prove with the research published in the recent edition of Nature. The answer was a conclusive "yes."
HPCwire: How much power is required to run the machine?
Rose: The total wall-plug power consumed by a D-Wave One system is 15 kilowatts. This power requirement will not change as the processors become more powerful over time.
HPCwire: How much does D-Wave One cost?
Rose: Pricing for D-Wave One is consistent with large-scale, high-performance computing systems.
HPCwire: What kinds of problems is it capable of solving? Have you demonstrated any specific algorithms?
Rose: We have used the D-Wave One to run numerous applications. For example, we used the system to solve optimization problems arising from building software that could detect cars in images. This process outputs software that can be deployed anywhere — mobile phones, for example. The software the D-Wave One system wrote, with collaborators from Google and D-Wave, was among the best detectors of cars in images ever built. It is discussed at http://googleresearch.blogspot.c ... -with-quantum.html.
HPCwire: What's next?
Rose: This is a very significant time in the history of D-Wave. We've sold the world's first commercial quantum computer to a large global security company, Lockheed Martin. That's a real milestone for us. We are excited to work with Lockheed and future customers to tackle complex problems traditional methods cannot resolve. Last week we were validated on the science side by Nature and this week, on the business side, by the sale of our quantum computer to this Fortune 500 company. |
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ResellerMaxis posted on 18-5-2013 09:18 AM
besar macam dalam gambar tu..yang box dwave belakang mamat berdiri tu rasanya..
ni web company ...
beso nye...pjg lak tu..
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Post time 18-5-2013 07:10 AM
变色卡
Author
