On the road to the Singularity.
One step closer to the PSC (personal super computer)?
This past winter Calvin College professor Joel Adams and then Calvin senior Tim Brom built Microwulf, a portable supercomputer with 26.25 gigaflops peak performance, that cost less than $2,500 to construct, becoming the most cost-efficient supercomputer anywhere that Adams knows of. “It’s small enough to check on an airplane or fit next to a desk,” said Brom. Instead of a bunch of researchers having to share a single Beowulf cluster supercomputer, now each researcher can have their own.
But what I really want to know is how long I have to wait for a MacBook Pro with 100+ qubits?
The heart of any quantum computer, whether it’s built on a sliver of semiconductor or not, is the qubit. A word about the qubit: it’s odd.
In an ordinary computer, information is stored as bits, usually a minuscule reservoir of charge or the charge’s absence in a memory cell’s capacitor. At any given instant, an ordinary binary digit can be in one and only one of two different states. But the value of a qubit is determined by the quantum states of individual particles. So, like those quantum states, a qubit can have the value 1, or 0, or it can be—in the paradoxical world of the quantum—both values at the same time. This versatility is central to the power of quantum computers. In an ordinary computer you can represent a number between 0 and 31 using five binary digits. But using the same number of qubits you could represent all 32 numbers at once and perform the same calculation on them simultaneously. And that’s not even the end of the weirdness: two or more qubits can be linked together in ways no two transistors could ever be, influencing each other instantaneously—even if they are separated by a distance of light-years.
Now I just need to figure out what the equivalent of ‘quantum entanglement’ for finance…do risk quarks have spin???
Update
(from the NY Times) Researchers at I.B.M. laboratories say they have made progress toward storing information and computing at the level of individual atoms.
The scientists documented their work in two papers appearing on Friday in the journal Science. Both papers are focused on new understanding of the behavior of magnetism at the tiny scale of nanotechnology, where scientists hope to develop electronics made from components that are far smaller than today’s transistors and wires.
In one paper the researchers describe a technique for reading and writing digital ones and zeroes onto a handful of atoms, or even individual atoms. The second paper describes the ability to use a single molecule as a switch, replicating the behavior of today’s transistors.
The papers are the latest indication that computing technology is beginning to emerge that could replace today’s microelectronics materials in the next decade.
