FollowAs the age of silicon computer comes to an end, high-tech companies attempt to position themselves as innovation leaders. Google teams UC Santa Barbara to work together on developing quantum computing processors. The choice was not random, as researchers from this university are already working on improving the futuristic technology that still has a couple of important issues to be overcome.
Quantum computing means a change of paradigm in technology. The new approach will produce computers capable of reaching some mind boggling speeds. Compared to today’s computers, quantum computers will be millions of times faster.
Google’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence will collaborate with UC Santa Barbara to solve quantum computing’s biggest problem encountered so far – instability. Today’s processing technology uses transistors to engage in binary computing. For a change, quantum computing relies on subatomic properties to drastically increase computing power. The qubit can have multiple states at the same time, instead of just 0 or 1. However, minor changes in temperature or magnetism render the qubits unstable.
In the meantime, the classical silicon based computing development carries on. AMD just released three affordable eight-core processors on Tuesday.
Google teams UC Santa Barbara after the company collaborated with D-Waves Systems and NASA
D-Waves System is the leading company in quantum computing research. Google was pleased with D-Waves results, but noted that we do not have the technology to accurately measure quantum computing performance, Cnet noted earlier this year.
Google made the announcement of collaborating with UC Santa Barbara in a blog post. They explained the recent efforts so far:
“With an integrated hardware group the Quantum AI team will now be able to implement and test new designs for quantum optimization and inference processors based on recent theoretical insights as well as our learnings from the D-Wave quantum annealing architecture,” Hartmut Neven, Director of Engineering said. “We will continue to collaborate with D-Wave scientists and to experiment with the “Vesuvius” machine at NASA Ames which will be upgraded to a 1000 qubit “Washington” processor.”
Google teamed up with NASA to improve D-Waves’ quantum computing products. Now Google chose to expand its partners, in a move clearly indicating the company’s desire to implement the technology as fast as possible. John Martinis from UC Santa Barbara published results on quantum computing research which convinced Google to step up and offer to collaborate on the project.
