About a year from now, banks, pharmaceutical companies and other large institutions will be able to rent time on a computer that calculates by studying the behaviour of a niobium atom, according to D-Wave Systems.
The Canadian company on Tuesday gave a public demonstration of Orion, its quantum computer, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. D-Wave said it is going to try to sell computing services to corporate customers in the first quarter of 2008.
Quantum computers, which researchers have experimented with for years but which haven't yet existed outside the laboratory, are radically different from today's electronic computers. D-Wave's computer is based around a silicon chip that houses 16 "qubits", the equivalent of a storage bit in a conventional computer, connected to each other. Each qubit consists of dots of the element niobium surrounded by coils of wire.
When electrical current comes down the wire, magnetic fields are generated, which, in turn, causes the change in the state of the qubit. Because scientists understand how niobium will react to magnetic fields and calculate the exact pattern and timing of the magnetic fields created, the pattern of changes exhibited by the niobium can then be translated into an answer that humans can understand.
"The qubits behave according to a certain set of rules," said founder and chief technology officer Geordie Rose, who likened quantum computing to trying to decipher the language of atoms. "Quantum computing is the translation of those laws into a format that we can take."
Ultimately, D-Wave's computer is an analogue computer, according to Alexey Andreev, a venture capitalist at Harris & Harris and an investor in D-Wave. Answers to programs run on the computer come in the form of a physical simulation. Answers to problems in digital computers are essentially mathematical solutions.
Because of its inherent properties, D-Wave's computer is optimised for running complex and often consuming simulations — for example, what happens when different variables are changed in an ornate financial model, or how different proteins interact with various synthetic, simulated pharmaceuticals. The system also could be used for non-scientific research such as searching patent databases for matches and overlap of intellectual property.
"We view these machines as probability distribution generators," Rose said. "We want to build an actual physical embodiment of a hard maths problem."
Right now, Orion is a "proof of concept", a demonstration of what the final product could look like. At the demonstration, Rose made the system come up with answers to Sudoku problems and, in another demo, seek out similar molecules to the active ingredient in the drug Prilosec in a chemical database. The computer found several molecules that shared similar structural elements with Prilosec, but the molecule that matched it closest was the active ingredient in another drug called Nexium. Plucking out Nexium demonstrated the system's accuracy, the company said. Nexium is actually a mirror image of the molecule in Prilosec that AstraZeneca invented to extend its patents.
In another example, he ran a seating chart program where each guest had particular seating requirements. (Cleopatra could not sit next to meat eaters. Genghis Khan eats meat, and so on.) The system came up with a seating plan with a minimum number of violations of protocol.
The computer itself — which is cooled down to four millikelvin (or nearly minus 273.15 degrees Celsius) with liquid helium — was in Canada. Attendees only saw the results on a screen. Still, it was the largest demonstration of a quantum computer ever, Rose said.
By the end of the year, however, D-Wave will have a 32-qubit system. It plans to begin to rent out time on its computers to corporate customers in the first quarter of next year, said chief executive Herb Martin. Customers won't have to learn…
