Current quantum computers aren't that big, but
they're only good for multiplying numbers up to 15 (I've heard rumors of 21!)
As with the early Cray supercomputers, where the
size of the air conditioners and power systems
were much larger than the round wirey bits,
a quantum computer is likely to be pretty small
but may have some bigger helium coolers on-site.
Remember that you're trying to entangle subatomic
particles, and maybe have some magnetic detector
things that still aren't all that big.
If quantum computers became practical, they'd be
using them to crack codes, factoring 1024-bit numbers or whatever.
What's really big are the NON-quantum computers
they'd be using to attack those problems now.
The reason they need all that space is almost
certainly for conventional data storage and processing.
They want to be able to collect and store
everybody's phone calls, locations, credit card
purchases, and internet traffic,
so they're handling multiple petabytes of data a
day, finding the interesting bits,
correlating the interesting people with other
people who might have been in the same place at the same time,
saving the parts that might be useful
later. Maybe doing some voice recognition on all their phone calls.
It takes a lot of basic horsepower and storage,
and the correlation takes a lot of memory.
I think they've bought themselves a lot of
cheap-ass electrical work, done by people who assume that
scaling up power requirements for a conventional
data center by a factor of 10-100 doesn't change the principles.
At 07:11 PM 10/9/2013, brian carroll wrote:
Lodewijk andré de la porte <<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
> The massive quantum computer has unpredictable power consumption.
Lee Azzarello
<<mailto:[email protected]>[email protected]> wrote:
> I guess inventing new math to break crypto has some physics problems.
these comments has me contemplating what a
large-scale networked quantum computer
installation would involve.. and to what extent
the image of racks of servers may note correlate
with the computing technology inside the boxes,
or in some percentage of the data centre.
in other words- how would a quantum installation
differ from the classical computer systems of
the last many decades- would they be of yet
another smaller scale or would an installation
inherently be enormous. what if the data centre
was all quantum computing in terms of the data
throughput - do these numbers correlate or are
different approaches to security calculations required
is it possible that a 'computer within a
computer' could exist, such that a quantum chip
could be embedded and use a classical electronic
based system, that is, some form of stealth or
hidden computing that occurs in a parallel
hidden framework, including for networking data.
could ethernet or fibre channel be used or would
it need to be different, say tuned resonant
circuits computing in other dimensionality.
