Quantum Computer Built On Server Racks Paves the Way To Bigger Machines

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: A Canadian startup called Xanadu has built a new quantum computer it says can be easily scaled up to achieve the computational power needed to tackle scientific challenges ranging from drug discovery to more energy-efficient machine learning. Aurora is a "photonic" quantum computer, which means it crunches numbers using photonic qubits -- information encoded in light. In practice, this means combining and recombining laser beams on multiple chips using lenses, fibers, and other optics according to an algorithm. Xanadu's computer is designed in such a way that the answer to an algorithm it executes corresponds to the final number of photons in each laser beam. This approach differs from one used by Google and IBM, which involves encoding information in properties of superconducting circuits.

Aurora has a modular design that consists of four similar units, each installed in a standard server rack that is slightly taller and wider than the average human. To make a useful quantum computer, "you copy and paste a thousand of these things and network them together," says Christian Weedbrook, the CEO and founder of the company. Ultimately, Xanadu envisions a quantum computer as a specialized data center, consisting of rows upon rows of these servers. This contrasts with the industry's earlier conception of a specialized chip within a supercomputer, much like a GPU. [...]

Xanadu's 12 qubits may seem like a paltry number next to IBM's 1,121, but Tiwari says this doesn't mean that quantum computers based on photonics are running behind. In his opinion, the number of qubits reflects the amount of investment more than it does the technology's promise. [...] Xanadu's next goal is to improve the quality of the photons in the computer, which will ease the error correction requirements. "When you send lasers through a medium, whether it's free space, chips, or fiber optics, not all the information makes it from the start to the finish," he says. "So you're actually losing light and therefore losing information." The company is working to reduce this loss, which means fewer errors in the first place. Xanadu aims to build a quantum data center, with thousands of servers containing a million qubits, in 2029. The company published its work on chip design optimization and fabrication in the journal Nature.

Is this the first

[dayL8]

time that a quantum copmuter has fit into a rack?

Re:

[timeOday]

You can ignore that part. What this is about is how to sequence multiple processing steps to perform useful calculations. Most research is on how to make one useful computation (which is still a thorny problem), this is about chaining them together (without going back and forth from quantum to traditional computing).

From the paper: "Although promising progress on the performance and function of many building blocks for both approaches has been reported, no complete photonic architecture has been experim

Energy efficiency?

[jenningsthecat]

Beyond a mention of "more energy-efficient machine learning", I didn't see anything in either of TFAs that hinted at this approach being more energy efficient than traditional processors.

Does anybody here know it there's potential here for significant energy savings - say, in the tens-of-percent or more? Could this substantially mitigate the energy disaster associated with AI, Bitcoin, and even just plain old doom-scrolling?

"It can easily scaled up to do X but..."

[greytree]

"...we're not going to do it."

Hmmm.

Re:

[phantomfive]

Yeah, just do it. Stop bragging and build it.

Once you've built it, you don't need to brag. People will know.

More QC hype and vaporware

[RUs1729]

Anybody taking bets that these guys will still be trying to peddle the same vaporware until gullible investors wise up?

Drug Discovery?

[methano]

I've been doing "drug discovery" for 40 years. That's always the first thing these great computational leaps are gonna help. I'm sorry to say it's not gonna happen. First, the computational models, which are used to say where all the atoms are, are just not good enough to drive drug discovery in a a meaningful way. Faster computation is just going to get us to that fuzzy picture faster. And allow us to look at those fuzzy models with nicer and nicer views. The fuzzy models are nice if things are connected. Figuring out where the waters are, which may be equally important from an energetics viewpoint, is even more primitive. Second, there is no second. The first problem says it all. To discover drugs, you need good organic chemists putting powders in bottles and good biologists figuring out how good those powders are. Everybody has been trying to cut out the chemist for the last 40 years, cause they're expensive and snarly. But it hasn't worked very well, so far.

Different meaning

[Okian Warrior]

I've been doing "drug discovery" for 40 years.

I totally read that in a way that you probably didn't mean.

I think.

Did you mean to use the scare quotes?

Re:

[Spinlock_1977]

As much as we all love our neighborhood chemist, beaker-sneaker-net will not out-pace a photon phrenzy in the long run.

In what way is the racking relevant?

[drinkypoo]

The computers take up multiple whole racks, so the fact that they're racks is completely irrelevant. They could just be cabinets, at that size there is no difference whatsoever. They're also not useful for anything no matter what size you make them, except extracting money from overstuffed budgets. (That's not nothing, but it is nothing useful as far as computing goes.)

Re:

[FictionPimp]

It's more than that.

Aurora has a modular design that consists of four similar units, each installed in a standard server rack that is slightly taller and wider than the average human. To make a useful quantum computer, "you copy and paste a thousand of these things and network them together," says Christian Weedbrook, the CEO and founder of the company. Ultimately, Xanadu envisions a quantum computer as a specialized data center, consisting of rows upon rows of these servers.

So a quantum computer is thousan

"slightly taller and wider than the average human"

[davidwr]

Queue non-standard-/rarely-used-measuring-unit jokes in III, 1+1, 10^0...