Google, NASA: Our quantum computer is 100 million times faster than normal PC

[bananas]

Source: Ars Technica

But only for very specific optimization problems.

Two years ago Google and NASA went halfsies on a D-Wave quantum computer, mostly to find out whether there are actually any performance gains to be had when using quantum annealing instead of a conventional computer. Recently, Google and NASA received the latest D-Wave 2X quantum computer, which the company says has "over 1000 qubits."

At an event yesterday at the NASA Ames Research Center, where the D-Wave computer is kept, Google and NASA announced their latest findings—and for highly specialised workloads, quantum annealing does appear to offer a truly sensational performance boost. For an optimisation problem involving 945 binary variables, the D-Wave X2 is up to 100 million times faster (10^8) than the same problem running on a single-core classical (conventional) computer.

Google and NASA also compared the D-Wave X2's quantum annealing against Quantum Monte Carlo, an algorithm that emulates quantum tunnelling on a conventional computer. Again, a speed-up of up to 10^8 was seen in some cases.

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Read more: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/google-nasa-our-quantum-computer-is-100-million-times-faster-than-normal-pc/

[ErikJ]

1. Time for a fight; Watson vs D-Wave.

15 rounds

[sofa king]

2. If you ask it the right question.

If the right person asks me the right question, I'm faster than that:

Halle Berry: "Hey, wanna--"

Me, lighting a cigarette: "That was great!"

[Submariner]

3. After my Windows 10 upgrade experience I believe it!

Wow...did that PC get sloooooow.

It was so bad I switched from windows PC and windows phone to an iMac and iPhone. Best purchases i've made in a very long time.

[cstanleytech]

13. Hmm I am on a 4 year old laptop running windows 10 and only 4gb memory and I havent noticed any

such slowness with this system vs windows 7.

[Submariner]

17. I have 2 gb memory

and the first ten minutes were excruciating. A background scan by windows would slow everything to a crawl until the windows 10 upgrade window would pop up at every boot up/restart asking me if i want to upgrade to windows 10 Pro.

I would check the 'don't remind me' box, but it never worked. It always reminded me and slowed the machine in the process. Windows update also took a long time to process. Windows 7 was much smoother, but I was forced into the windows 10 upgrade, and my 4yr old laptop didn't like the background scans a bit.

I now have 16 gb of memory with a 512 gb flash drive for a hard drive now that has me online within 10 seconds of boot up. Lightning fast, so I'm spoiled now and there is no going back.

[VanillaRhapsody]

26. 2 gb????

and you were expecting speed?

[Gore1FL]

4. I wonder how well KSP would run on it. n/t

[w0nderer]

5. waterboarding is a lot faster than cracking n/t

[Kablooie]

6. There goes computer security.

Once quantum computers are functional they will be able to crack all current security schemes within seconds. No more private communications or bank accounts. Everything will be able to be read openly.

[bvf]

7. No, there'll be quantum encryption as well,

which will effectively make communication systems more, not less, secure. The mechanism escapes me offhand, but I think it has to do with enabling near-instantaneous detection of any attempts at intrusion in the pathway.

Well, that's what I've read, anyway.

ETA: I've heard that D-Wave's technology was really not based on QC, but some sort of hybrid of QC and conventional processing. (That was in the effort's infancy, IIRC. Things may have changed since then.)

Anyway, science and evolution march on, and I love reading about this stuff, even though a lot of it goes "Whoosh!"

[AZ Progressive]

9. Anything previously encrypted with standard encryption though, that is saved on nsa computers, can..

be decrypted with quantum computers.

[bvf]

11. True, if anyone manages to implement

Shor's algorithm or something similar that is capable of factoring RSA-level integers anytime soon, that's a problem in the short term. As of late last year though, we were only talking about factoring numbers as large as 56153. That's what? 16 bits?

Moore's Law aside (and I don't even know if it applies to this newfangled stuff), I'm not worried (yet!).

[Elmer S. E. Dump]

15. 16 bits (x'DB59')

They have quite a way to go to 4096 RSA keys.

[bvf]

21. Exactly my point, which I probably wasn't very clear on.

There's a lo-o-ong way to go. I don't think we'll be seeing hackers pounding away at QC laptops (that's a joke) capable of extricating factors of 128- or even 256-bit (much less 4096-bit) primes any time soon.

Nobody's hair should be on fire here, but when news like the above gets picked up by the popular press for consumption, you can guess the magnitude of unfounded concern among the general readership that might result.

[Elmer S. E. Dump]

25. You were clear. I was just supporting your conclusion.

[bvf]

27. Thanks for that!

I re-read my post and thought it may have come across as vaguely alarmist.

[Kablooie]

19. But who will have quantum computers that can create the quantum encryption?

Not you or I.
Probably not even your bank.

Only other nations or super rich James Bond type villains will have the capability of encrypting and decrypting quantum algorithms unless quantum computers become commonplace and that is not likely anytime in the near future.

[bvf]

23. The technology will eventually work its way down

(over years--more likely decades). It's always worked that way. That's how we got here, talking about this very thing, thank DARPA.

[eggplant]

8. Solutions come from problems.

Yes, conventional encryption depends on the idea that brute-force decryption is unworkably slow in comparison to the time it takes to do encryption. I don't think that quantum computing changes this disparity.

And even if it does, there's money to be made in coming up with better solutions. Sure, today's encryption won't last forever, but there will always be secrets and ways to keep them that way.

[byronius]

10. Kim Stanley Robinson agrees somewhat, but goes further.

Everyone will have to have one, or surrender privacy. And the end result of all that electronic brinksmanship will be all-powerful AI's that may or may not wish our species to continue.

[bemildred]

12. Butterflys work great for the FFT too.

It will have all sorts of effects if they can break strong encryption. If you can solve NP-complete problems in polynonial time, it will break all kinds of things. But I think it may well be the case that it stays a special purpose architecture, like the butterfly.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/login.jsp?tp=&arnumber=670008&url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fxpls%2Fabs_all.jsp%3Farnumber%3D670008

Scalability makes severe demands once you get serious about it.

[Taitertots]

14. Who own the intellectual property rights?

Sounds like we're paying (going halfsies) to upgrade google's servers.

If the government does own it the government shouldn't be funding it.

[Nye Bevan]

16. They should also get a solid state hard drive for that baby.

I found that to really speed up my boot time.

[MosheFeingold]

18. 42

I heard all this computer keeps saying is "The answer is 42."

No one knows why.

[w0nderer]

20. lol n/t

[AlbertCat]

22. Our quantum computer is 100 million times faster than normal PC

It's just correct and incorrect at the same time....

[PersonNumber503602]

24. heh,,, I remember I was trying to wrap my head around that, but my head exploded

My IT skills were of no help. I suppose it's time to get my PhD in physics so I can at least maybe get the next generation of entry-level compTIA certifications.