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Category: supercomputing – Page 90

I told folks this; I see another one from Google has joined the QC less than 10 year club. My guess is more likely less than 7 years.

A seminal moment in the quantum technology field just happened: Google’s team of scientists have simulated a hydrogen molecule from its quantum computers, a breakthrough that suggests it could “simulate even larger chemical systems,” writes one of Google Quantum’s engineers, Ryan Rabbush. The search engine’s achievement underscores the technology’s potential as Rabbush posits it can “revolutionize the design of solar cells, industrial catalysts, batteries, flexible electronics, medicines, materials and more.”

As advances in such supercomputers continue, investment and research in this field gathers greater momentum as Google, Alibaba, Baidu, Amazon and other tech giants and governments too are racing to develop this technology. Recently, the European Commission allocated €1 billion to research, incubate and invest in quantum technologies. Meanwhile Google last month made headlines about testing its quantum security to shield its Chrome browser.

“It is a technology that is developing very rapidly,” explains Serguei Beloussov, CEO and founder of data security firm Acronis, adding that industries related to “creativity and human ingenuity” are more difficult to predict and that is the case with this fast-developing field. “Quantum computing at the moment [particularly] quantum metrology and quantum security are things that are dependent on science so [development] can be very slow or rapid. If this technology actually appears, it will be such a huge change that companies like Amazon, Alibaba, Google want to be in front of that change and that is why they are investing,” says this tech expert who is also executive chairman of tech company, Parallels.

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Lookout world Chine Tech is rising and nothing or no one will stop it now. The real question is how soon with the world’s tech valley hub be in China? The US has enjoyed for many decades being the world’s top technology center. However, China for the past 20+ years has been executing their world footprint in owning the title as the top global economic power. In the past we have seen them take over consumer goods manufacturing, pharma (especially generic drugs), and the latest is tech. Wonder what is next?

TOKYO — China has jumped to the front ranks of the supercomputing powers, with its Sunway TaihuLight, powered by domestically developed chips, recently recognized as the fastest computer in the world.

In its debut on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers in June, the Sunway TaihuLight overwhelmed such rivals as the Tianhe-2, a Chinese supercomputer powered by Intel chips that has claimed the No. 1 spot on the past six Top500 lists. Furthermore, it was the first time for China to surpass the U.S. in the total number of systems on the list.

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Electronic computer technology has moved from valves to transistors to progressively more complex integrated circuits and processor designs, with each change bringing higher levels of performance. Now the advent of quantum computers promises a huge step increase in processor performance to solve certain types of problems.

Quantum computers are much faster than the world’s fastest supercomputers for some applications. In 1994 Peter Shor, an applied mathematician at Bell Laboratories, gave the encryption world a shock when he demonstrated an algorithm showing that quantum computers could threaten conventional prime number based encryption methods.

If an adversary conducts successful espionage raids on encrypted information stored in present technology computer installations, possibly through a compromised or issue-motivated individual who transfers it to portable media, it could become vulnerable to decryption by that rival’s quantum computers.

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Lateral photonic integration of oxide-confined leaky vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers enables their application in data communications and sensing.

Vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs) that operate at 850nm and are based on oxide-confined apertures are widely used in optical interconnects in data centers, supercomputers, wireless backbone networks, and consumer applications.1 As the processor productivity in these applications increases, it is necessary to continuously improve performance and scale transmission speeds accordingly. In recent years, developers have produced a generation of devices capable of transmitting 40Gb/s at moderate current densities,2, 3 and they have recently demonstrated 54Gb/s non-return-to-zero transmission through 2.2km of multimode fiber.4 Now, 108Gb/s per wavelength transmission can be realized over 100–300m of multimode fiber through the use of advanced modulation formats: discrete multi-tone,5 multiCAP,6 and PAM4.

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A team built a specialized, layered structure with tiny metallic cavities that improves the light conversion efficiency by orders of magnitude.

ncident laser beam (top of the figure) illuminating an array of nanoscale gold resonators on the surface of a quantum well semiconductor

Artist’s rendering of an incident laser beam (top of the figure) illuminating an array of nanoscale gold resonators on the surface of a “quantum well” semiconductor (slab in figure). (A quantum well is a thin layer that can restrict the movement of electrons to that layer.) The incoming laser beam interacts with the array and the quantum wells and is converted into two new laser beams with different wavelengths. Changing the size, shape, and arrangement of the resonators can be used for beam focusing, beam steering, or control of the beam’s angular momentum. (Image: Sandia National Laboratories)

The new concept explained in the studies can open doors for advanced lasers for optical communications and efficient manufacturing. It can also support efforts to miniaturize optical components for high-speed computing, telecommunications, cameras, and quantum computing that will solve computational problems currently intractable by today’s supercomputers.

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Computers use switches to perform calculations. A complex film with “quantum wells”—regions that allow electron motion in only two dimensions—can be used to make efficient switches for high-speed computers. For the first time, this oxide film exhibited a phenomenon, called resonant tunneling, in which electrons move between quantum wells at a specific voltage. This behavior allowed an extremely large ratio (about 100,000:1) between two states, which can be used in an electronic device as an ON/OFF switch to perform mathematical calculations (Nature Communications, “Resonant tunneling in a quantum oxide superlattice”).

Quantum wells

Efficient control of electron motion can be used to reduce the power requirements of computers. “Quantum wells” (QW) are regions that allow electron motion in only two dimensions. The lines (bottom) in the schematic show the probability of finding electrons in the structure. The structure is a complex oxide (top) with columns (stacked blue dots corresponding to an added element) where the electrons are free to move in only two dimensions. This is a special type of quantum well called a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG). (Image: Ho Nyung Lee, Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

To meet our exponentially growing need for computing power without a corresponding jump in energy use, scientists need more efficient electronic versions of switches to perform calculations. Efficient switches need materials that switch between well-defined ON/OFF states. The results of this study could lead to a new class of energy-efficient electronics because these materials can ensure the electronic switches are ON or OFF. These electronic switches could lower power consumption in electronics enabling, for example, the development of high-speed supercomputers and cell phones with longer battery life.

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Like this feature on QC.

If you have trouble wrapping your mind around quantum physics, don’t worry — it’s even hard for supercomputers. The solution, according to researchers from Google, Harvard, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories and others? Why, use a quantum computer, of course. The team accurately predicted chemical reaction rates using a supercooled quantum circuit, a result that could lead to improved solar cells, batteries, flexible electronics and much more.

Chemical reactions are inherently quantum themselves — the team actually used a quote from Richard Feynman saying “nature isn’t classical, dammit.” The problem is that “molecular systems form highly entangled quantum superposition states, which require many classical computing resources in order to represent sufficiently high precision,” according to the Google Research blog. Computing the lowest energy state for propane, a relatively simple molecule, takes around ten days, for instance. That figure is required in order to get the reaction rate.

That’s where the “Xmon” supercooled qubit quantum computing circuit (shown above) comes in. The device, known as a “variational quantum eigensolver (VQE)” is the quantum equivalent of a classic neural network. The difference is that you train a classical neural circuit (like Google’s DeepMind AI) to model classical data, and train the VQE to model quantum data. “The quantum advantage of VQE is that quantum bits can efficiently represent the molecular wave function, whereas exponentially many classical bits would be required.”

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Listen up all my QC buddies; the air force wants to hear from you. You have QC ideas for fighter jets they want you.

Guess I need to submit them some of mine.

The Air Force wants white papers that describe new ways quantum computing could help achieve its mission, according to an amended Broad Agency Announcement posted Friday. Eventually, the government could provide a test-bed where a contractor might install, develop and test a quantum computing system, according to the announcement.

Last year, the Air Force announced it had about $40 million available to fund research into, and the eventual maintenance and installation of a quantum system — a branch of emerging computing technology that relies on the mechanics of atomic particles to process complex equations.

The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Information Directorate, which focuses on processes such as signal processing, networking technology, cyber research and supercomputing, is collecting those white papers.

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