Google: Our quantum computer is 100 million times faster than a conventional system
Ever since quantum computer manufacturer D-Wave announced that it had created an actual system, there have been skeptics. The primary concern was that D-Wave hadn’t built a quantum computer as such, but instead constructed a system that happened to simulate a quantum annealer — one specific type of quantum computing that the D-Wave performs — more effectively than any previous architecture.
Earlier reports suggested this was untrue, and Google has now put such fears to rest. The company has presented findings conclusively demonstrating the D-Wave does perform quantum annealing, and is capable of solving certain types of problems up to 100 million times faster than conventional systems. Over the past two years, D-Wave and Google have worked together to test the types of solutions that the quantum computer could create and measure its performance against traditional CPU and GPU compute clusters. In a new blog post, Hartmut Neven, director of engineering at Google, discusses the proof-of-principle problems the company designed and executed to demonstrate “quantum annealing can offer runtime advantages for hard optimization problems characterized by rugged energy landscapes.” He writes:
“We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 108 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core. We also compared the quantum hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes as high as 108.”
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/219160-goo...nal-system
Ever since quantum computer manufacturer D-Wave announced that it had created an actual system, there have been skeptics. The primary concern was that D-Wave hadn’t built a quantum computer as such, but instead constructed a system that happened to simulate a quantum annealer — one specific type of quantum computing that the D-Wave performs — more effectively than any previous architecture.
Earlier reports suggested this was untrue, and Google has now put such fears to rest. The company has presented findings conclusively demonstrating the D-Wave does perform quantum annealing, and is capable of solving certain types of problems up to 100 million times faster than conventional systems. Over the past two years, D-Wave and Google have worked together to test the types of solutions that the quantum computer could create and measure its performance against traditional CPU and GPU compute clusters. In a new blog post, Hartmut Neven, director of engineering at Google, discusses the proof-of-principle problems the company designed and executed to demonstrate “quantum annealing can offer runtime advantages for hard optimization problems characterized by rugged energy landscapes.” He writes:
“We found that for problem instances involving nearly 1000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly outperforms its classical counterpart, simulated annealing. It is more than 108 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core. We also compared the quantum hardware to another algorithm called Quantum Monte Carlo. This is a method designed to emulate the behavior of quantum systems, but it runs on conventional processors. While the scaling with size between these two methods is comparable, they are again separated by a large factor sometimes as high as 108.”
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/219160-goo...nal-system
