Quantum computer for sale

[Homer_simpson]

So I was in Vancouver this past week and visited a Canadian company called d-wave. The are selling quantum computers!
Their commercial version is a 128 qubit system at a modest price of 10 million dollars. It looks like a black box the size of ~ 10 household fridges. when speaking with their R&D guys they told me that they are prototyping a 512 qubit processor. I must mention that while these are legitimate quantum computers, they are not based on the gate model architecture. They are based on Adiabatic quantum computing. So they are not looking to use Shore's algorithm to crack RSA codes but hey big black box quantum computers are already available for sale. Kinda makes me think of the first computers that were giant black boxes
http://www.dwavesys.com/en/dw_homepage.html

[mirhagk]

That is amazing, $10 million is a little pricey but I imagine some universities or very large businesses may just have to find it in their budget somewhere.

I'm really interested in what the difference between gate model and adiabatic quantum computing is, if you know of any good articles on it that'd be awesome.

Thanks for sharing.

[Homer_simpson]

yes pretty pricy but I know they have at least sold one to Lockheed Martin.
Quantum gate computing works on the basis of the ability to act with arbitrary operators on the state of a system, wheras AQC relies on adiabatic theorem of Q.M. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_theorem) which roughly says that if the hamiltonian for the system is varied slowly enough the state of the system will remain in the same state it started in(i.e. ground state, first excited state, etc...) for the new hamiltonian. The use this fact by preparing the system in one way and then slowly varying the hamiltonian to that corresponding to the problem they are trying to solve and they measure the state of the system. In this way they can solve certain types of minimization problems much faster than classical computers. hope that helps
also this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adiabatic_quantum_computation

[BigBear]

Google has been using D-wave for a while now.

[ecookman]

Awesome lets buy one and run windows on it >: D

10M actually isn't that bad for a computer like this. I wonder how big that processor is....

[Homer_simpson]

I was lucky enough to go inside one of these beasts. the computer itself is big enough for ~10 people to walk into. It's mostly empty space made for electromagnetic shielding. the processor itself is a very small chip, probably smaller than your cpu. most of the gigantic size comes from having to cool the chip and the apparatus by various means to near 0 K and also the many layers of shielding from the outside world.

[tannerspence]

i will buy it with my poo shards