Re: OT: Re: [dev] mention suckless favorably in today's blog article A Quantum of Computing

From: Jimmy Tang <jtang_AT_tchpc.tcd.ie>
Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:31:21 +0100

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 08:25:15AM -0600, Jack Woehr wrote:
> I'm in my late 50's. It occurs to me as a possibility that barely
> practical QC will be
> the last great computational hardware leap forward during my working
> years. I'm
> guessing (I've lived through a lot of changes!) that by the time I'm 70
> we'll be in
> the "vacuum tube" era or working quantum computers.
>
> http://dwavesys.com claims great progress in hardware.

the last time i saw dwave systems was at a conference in 2007 (a HPC
conference) they seem to have faded into obscurity for anyone looking
*high performance*. I'm not sure how useful it really is, since its
sitting in a pci/pci-ex/pci-x slot you get into problems of getting data
to and from these cards fast enough to do useful generic computations
on (much like clearspeed cards or gpgpu programming) these dwave cards
are *highly specialised* and are probably useless to about 99% of people
who are looking for more performance, its interesting anyway.

>
> If you are interested, I will be blogging pretty steady about this on
> http://dobbscodetalk.com
> where I will be trying to get the readers to help me understand this
> puzzling field!

for those who don't know much about quantum computing or are just
interested, I would recommend this book

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Quantum-Computing-Natural-Mika-Hirvensalo/dp/3540407049/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1247584883&sr=1-1

the actual quantum computing bits are quite small, most of it is
either quantum mechanics or basic computing related material, it is an
interesting read for the un-initiated (I think). Some of the algorithms
in quantum computing are pretty nifty :) but to learn more about it,
you will probably need to follow various journals or dig around arxiv.org
or the cern yellow books for the really funky stuff.

Jimmy

-- 
Jimmy Tang
Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing,
Lloyd Building, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin 2, Ireland.
http://www.tchpc.tcd.ie/ | http://www.tchpc.tcd.ie/~jtang

Received on Tue Jul 14 2009 - 15:31:21 UTC

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