16 Qubit Quantum Computer to Debut on Feb 13th; 20 Years Ahead of Schedule

Twenty years before most scientists expected it, DWave has announced a 16 Qubit quantum computer that promises to massively speed up computation as we know it (64, 000 operations simultaneously). DWave will debut at two locations, one at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California on February 13th, and the second at the Telus World of Science in Vancouver, Canada on February 15th. These events were open to the public, but currently they are already filled up. The amount of anticipation worldwide is immense.

Affordable Quantum computing will pretty much render all of our existing cryptographic algorithms obsolete.

The Orion system is a hardware accelerator designed to solve a particular NP-complete problem called the two dimensional Ising model in a magnetic field. It is built around a 16-qubit superconducting adiabatic quantum computer processor. The system is designed to be used in concert with a conventional front end for any application that requires the solution of an NP-complete problem.

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The way it works is that when your software application needs to solve an NP-complete problem, it passes the problem to the Orion system. Nothing changes about the application architecture.

They are planning to provide free access to one of these systems in Q2/2007 to people who want to either develop or port applications to it. Count me as a volunteer. I am very much looking forward to using it.