If I'm not mistaken they are claiming their current model is using 256 qubits. If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying this thing could break SHA256 in 1 operation or less. That's a bit scary. Wonder what it could do on AES or RSA. Might also explain the NSA's $40million dollar electric bill at their new datacenter.
On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 4:28 PM, Todd Millecam <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > */ > /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
