On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 1:32 AM, Levi Pearson <[email protected]> wrote: On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 12:33 AM, S. Dale Morrey <[email protected]> wrote:
> I guess the only 2 questions I have are. > What would one of these be good at doing in layman's terms, i.e. breaking > crypto, solving pathway problems etc? > And of course just to make this on topic for the group... > Does it run Linux? It's legit, I've contacted them. It runs their own custom-built OS, which is really just a very lightweight vector table and you treat it as a device on a regular computer of your choice. I think when I asked them they said it was a modified version of solaris. It works like a regular machine with shell access, and you access the quantum computer via C++ API calls that they provide. Basically, what it can do is take the hash space of a crypto algorithm in terms of 2^x, and it changes it to 2^(x-q) where q is the number of qubits that the quantum computer is built off of. Highest qubit count that I've seen to date was some isreali researchers could get 13 entangled pairs, so that'd make breaking sha256 a take the time of going through 2^51 hashes over 2^64, which means that this particular computer could crack a sha256 password in about 600 days, over a regular cpu machine which would take 4.9 million days (not a GPU-accelerated or supercomputing cluster, mind you) The protein folding that it can accomplish is helpful for scientific purposes, and the $10 million makes sense in that context, but it's again, research, so not necessarily practical application. The downside is that this machine is liquid-nitrogen cooled because it uses superconductors--so the $10 million is hardly representative of operating costs. A single machine like this would probably cost more than $100k/day to operate at max load. -- Todd Millecam /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
