A Strange Computer Promises Great Speed
Kim Stallknecht for The New York Times
Lockheed Martin brought a version of D-Wave’s quantum computer and plans to upgrade it to commercial scale.
By QUENTIN HARDY
Published: March 21, 2013
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Our digital age is all about bits, those
precise ones and zeros that are the stuff of modern computer code.
More Tech Coverage
News from the technology industry, including start-ups, the Internet, enterprise and gadgets.
On Twitter: @nytimesbits.
On Twitter: @nytimesbits.
Kim Stallknecht for The New York Times
Geordie Rose, left, a founder and chief technical
officer of D-Wave, and Vern Brownell, the company’s chief executive.
But a powerful new type of computer that is about to be commercially
deployed by a major American military contractor is taking computing
into the strange, subatomic realm of quantum mechanics. In that
infinitesimal neighborhood, common sense logic no longer seems to apply.
A one can be a one, or it can be a one and a zero and everything in
between — all at the same time.
It sounds preposterous, particularly to those familiar with the yes/no
world of conventional computing. But academic researchers and scientists
at companies like Microsoft, I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard have been
working to develop quantum computers.
Now, Lockheed Martin — which bought an early version of such a computer from the Canadian company D-Wave Systems two years ago — is confident enough in the technology to upgrade it to commercial scale, becoming the first company to use quantum computing as part of its business.
Skeptics say that D-Wave has yet to prove to outside scientists that it
has solved the myriad challenges involved in quantum computation.
But if it performs as Lockheed and D-Wave expect, the design could be
used to supercharge even the most powerful systems, solving some science
and business problems millions of times faster than can be done today.
Ray Johnson, Lockheed’s chief technical officer, said his company would
use the quantum computer to create and test complex radar, space and
aircraft systems. It could be possible, for example, to tell instantly
how the millions of lines of software running a network of satellites
would react to a solar burst or a pulse from a nuclear explosion —
something that can now take weeks, if ever, to determine.
“This is a revolution not unlike the early days of computing,” he said.
“It is a transformation in the way computers are thought about.” Many
others could find applications for D-Wave’s computers. Cancer
researchers see a potential to move rapidly through vast amounts of
genetic data. The technology could also be used to determine the
behavior of proteins in the human genome, a bigger and tougher problem
than sequencing the genome. Researchers at Google have worked with
D-Wave on using quantum computers to recognize cars and landmarks, a
critical step in managing self-driving vehicles.
Quantum computing is so much faster than traditional computing because
of the unusual properties of particles at the smallest level. Instead of
the precision of ones and zeros that have been used to represent data
since the earliest days of computers, quantum computing relies on the
fact that subatomic particles inhabit a range of states. Different
relationships among the particles may coexist, as well. Those probable
states can be narrowed to determine an optimal outcome among a
near-infinitude of possibilities, which allows certain types of problems
to be solved rapidly.
D-Wave, a 12-year-old company based in Vancouver, has received
investments from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, which operates
one of the world’s largest computer systems, as well as from the
investment bank Goldman Sachs and from In-Q-Tel, an investment firm with
close ties to the Central Intelligence Agency and other government
agencies.
“What we’re doing is a parallel development to the kind of computing
we’ve had for the past 70 years,” said Vern Brownell, D-Wave’s chief
executive.
Mr. Brownell, who joined D-Wave in 2009, was until 2000 the chief
technical officer at Goldman Sachs. “In those days, we had 50,000
servers just doing simulations” to figure out trading strategies, he
said. “I’m sure there is a lot more than that now, but we’ll be able to
do that with one machine, for far less money.”
D-Wave, and the broader vision of quantum-supercharged computing, is not
without its critics. Much of the criticism stems from D-Wave’s own
claims in 2007, later withdrawn, that it would produce a commercial
quantum computer within a year.
- 1
- 2
No comments:
Post a Comment