Mostly Harmless

Donna's Pet Project

Disclaimer

Donna is building a quantum computer!

This has arrived in kit form from Sumover Futures Inc (I bet the stock analysts love that name) who are a startup specializing in qbit-logic workstations. Some marketing guy there (probably only half a marketing guy) decided it would be funky to use complex numbers for their branding - so this beast is an SFW 1000+8i. It looks like an ordinary workstation at the moment - because that's what it is - but then there's this big rack hanging off the back with some major cooling plant on 3-phase.

The rack, once you've fought your way inside it, can take up to 8 "superposition engines". Each one of these can maintain a goodly pile of quantum "dots" in a state of quantum coherency for a respectable number of seconds. The actual number of seconds achieved is a matter of luck, of course, the only guideline we have is an MTBF of about 4.5.

In use it's supposed to be a bit like programming an FPGA. The host OS on the workstation (our bit) allows you to build qbit processing logic into one or more engines and then release them, hoping they don't go classical before they spit out an answer. There's supposed to be a photonic crossbar linking the 8 units so they can exchange "data" without loss of coherence. This would effectively increase the number of coherent dots eightfold. The cost would be a substantially reduced MTBF but at that level of, er, simultaneity who cares if you only get it for a second? Unfortunately the cross-bar isn't supported yet. You need correction codes to allow you to ignore photons which have accidentally bounced off something, and Sumover haven't got them working yet. Donna claims to have some ideas about that - I hope none of them involves the shredder.

Posted at 09:14AM Apr 26, 2007 by John Alderson in Lake Guillemont  |  Comments[0]