U. Scientist Makes Computing Breakthrough
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By Joe Bauman Deseret Morning News  A University of Utah physicist and his team have made a breakthrough that could pave the way to quantum computing, in which computers can calculate many billions of times faster than they do now.
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Roger D. Kornberg, a biochemist at Stanford University, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry yesterday for figuring out the intricate way in which information in the DNA of a gene is copied to provide the instructions for building and running a living cell.
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One nanotechnology researcher said supercomputers small enough to fit into the palm of your hand are only 10 or 15 years away."If things continue to go the way they have been in the past few decades, then it's 10 years," said Michael Zaiser, a professor and researcher at the University of Edinburgh School of Engineering and Electronics. "The human brain is very good at working on microprocessor problems, so I think we are close -- 10 years, maybe 15."Zaiser's research into nanowires should help move that timeline along.For the last five years, he has been studying how tiny wires -- 1,000 times thinner than a human hair -- behave when manipulated. He explained that each such miniscule wire tends to behave differently when put under the same amount of pressure. Therefore, it has been impossible to line them up close to each other in tiny microprocessors in a production atmosphere.Zaiser said he's now figured out how to make the wires behave uniformly. He separates the interior material of the wire into distinct groups so the wire can't react as a whole. That makes it much easier to control. "It's like crowd control," he added. "If they can all go one way, you have a big mess."These nanowires will go inside microprocessors that could, in turn, go inside PCs, laptops, cell phones, or even supercomputers. And the smaller the wires, the smaller the chip can be.Shrinking down the microprocessors is a big step toward shrinking down computers.Zaiser was quick to point out that his nanowire discovery won't immediately lead to the development of supercomputers that can fit in the palm of a hand or even shrink down to the size of a book of matches. In addition to smaller microprocessors, engineers will need to deal with thermal fluctuations that erupt at that size.But he does humbly admit that taming nanowires is a big step toward the goal of small supercomputers."This will enable chips to become much smaller," he said. "Think 10 years back. You could hold [a cell phone] the size of a telephone receiver and it didn't work so well. Today, you can fit what is a powerful computer onto a small device."Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT in Hayward, Calif., said that with advances like nanowire technology continuing to come along, Zaiser's predictions for tiny supercomputers may not be so far off. And that will be a huge step for the industry, considering that not so long ago supercomputers filled up enormous rooms or even entire buildings."Actually, what he's saying is not crazy," said King. "The wire problem was an important one. Solving that particular issue, one so fundamental, needed to be done. If he can solve that, a lot of people, a lot of companies, will appreciate that. The industry is aligning in a direction where we're going to be seeing continuing improvements and developments."Jim McGregor, an analyst at In-Stat in Scottsdale, Ariz., said he definitely can see palm-size supercomputers coming out within 10 to 15 years, but he thinks they'll be based on the basic silicon technology used today. He added that the next generation of tiny supercomputers -- made with carbon nanotubes and nanowires -- may be as far off as another 30 to 40 years, though."You know, everybody says we'll get to a physical limit but every time we think we're going to hit it, we overcome it," said McGregor. "They end up being speed bumps instead of road blocks."King added that over the last 10 or 20 years, technology advancements have put smaller and more powerful computers into the hands of children and researchers alike. That leads him to believe that the shrinking of supercomputers is just ahead of us."We're at the beginning of some very exciting times in supercomputing," he said.Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration confirmed Thursday that it built a special chip used in a disputed demonstration of quantum computing in February. NASA engineers used their experience with submicrometer dimensions and ultra-low temperatures to build a quantum processor for Canadian startup D-Wave Systems, said Alan Kleinsasser, principal investigator in the quantum chip program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. D-Wave claimed to demonstrate a prototype quantum computer during a news conference Feb. 13 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. But industry experts became skeptical when D-Wave revealed it had left the computer at its Vancouver office, then conducted the demonstration over a Web link. "You could characterize our announcement as being met with enthusiasm from industry and skepticism from academia," D-Wave CEO Ed Martin said in an interview Feb. 27. But he said the event served as proof of concept of the technology and that D-Wave's potential customers are businesses that don't care how the technology works as long as it can solve their complex models. He plans to start renting time on the machine to customers in 2008. "Businesses aren't too fascinated about the details of quantum mechanics, but academics have their own axes to grind. I can assure you that our VCs look at us a lot closer than the government looks at the academics who win research grants," Martin said. He described D-Wave's computer as a hybrid, running applications on a traditional, digital computer and using a single quantum processor as an accelerator or coprocessor. Martin said the back end is a rack-mounted PC with an off-the-shelf processor, but he wouldn't cite the specific brand. The crucial part is the quantum chip, which is a processor built from the superconducting materials aluminum and niobium, then chilled in a tank of liquid helium. It achieves supercomputing speeds because its basic data units -- called qubits -- can hold both the values 0 and 1 simultaneously, and instantly share those values among all the qubits. A standard digital processor assigns a specific value to each data bit, and handles them one at a time. D-Wave designed the quantum chip and then contracted with NASA to build it. The request was nothing new for engineers at the MDL (Microdevices Laboratory), a unit of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who were accustomed to building superconducting circuits for clients like Hypres, a company in Elmsford, New York, and for instruments used aboard spacecraft like the European Space Agency's Herschel mission. "There has been activity in MDL in quantum technology, including quantum computing, for around 10 years," Kleinsasser said. "Superconducting quantum computing technology requires devices and ultra-low [millikelvin] temperatures that are also required in much of our sensor work. A couple of years ago, D-Wave recognized that JPL is capable of producing the chips it wished to design. There is no [private] industry that can deliver such superconducting devices. So we worked out a collaboration that produced the chips that D-Wave is currently using." The computer that D-Wave used for the Feb. 13 demonstration had a chip capable of running at 16 qubits, Martin said. The company plans to scale its machine much larger in the next 18 months, reaching 32 qubits by the end of 2007, then 512 qubits and 1,024 qubits by the end of 2008. Still, D-Wave will surprise a lot of experts if it can reach its goals. Many analysts say quantum computing is feasible but that a working system is still a decade or more away. "Given the kind of upheaval a working quantum system would bring, especially to the financial system where cryptography would become vulnerable, it would be major technology breakthrough," said Martin Kariithi, an analyst with Technology Business Research. "I don't think a small company like D-Wave would pull it off; they are likely to get absorbed by a tech heavyweight like Intel or IBM as they get within five to eight years of a solution," he said. Â
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Computer science professor Marvin Minsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is known for feats that range from inventing the ultrahigh-resolution confocal microscope to helping found the field of artificial intelligence, which aims to create computers that mimic the human mind.
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A Scottish engineer has figured out how to tame microscopic wires, making it easier to build smaller microprocessors, which will eventually lead to smaller supercomputers.
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More than 150,000 home computer users are helping scientists find new ways to treat diseases like Alzheimer's.