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Quantum Computing

Reporter’s Notebook – At MIT Tech Review Future Compute 2023: Navigating the straits of semis

May 9, 2023 By Jack Vaughan

[May 9, 2023 ] – When the US last year announced new export rules on advanced chips,  the role of semiconductors in modern foreign affairs reached a new zenith. The chips have assumed the stature of oil in today’s geopolitics and depriving China of the chips now seems a strategic objective.

Unease has only grown with the appearance of the ChatGPT AI Large Language Model, which is a chip-hungry, power-guzzling presence ready to take over the world, to hear networks of experts and Cassandras tell it. Just as unsettling are Chinese maneuvers around Taiwan, a crucial center of global chip production.

Such activity formed a partial backdrop for the MIT Technology Review’s recent Future Compute 2023 conference at the Cambridge, Mass. Campus. Semiconductor issues were probed in a Q&A session featuring Chris Miller, Tufts University lecturer and author.

Miller said the semiconductor has taken on an outsized role in strategizing on China, and that the focus now is both on economics and defense.

”China spends as much money importing chips each year as importing oil,” he said. “You can’t understand the structure of the world economy without putting semiconductors at the center of your analysis.”

This is increasingly true for economic issues, Miller continued. Semiconductors that drive computers and embedded systems are top of mind when defense ministries and intelligence agencies think about future procurements.

“What they know is that over the past half century one of the key forces that’s transformed the way militaries fight has been computing power,” according to Miller, who traced the developments leading to the present predicament in “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology,” a recent noteworthy [Financial Times Book of the Year 2022] look at semiconductor industry history and its ever-shifting role in the larger body politic.

“Chip War” is described by a New York Times reviewer as something of a nonfiction thriller in which ‘pocket-protector men’ at Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel  tamed the raw transistor, fashioned the Integrated Circuit, outdid the Soviet Union, and left a war weary Europe in the dust as they formed what’s now Silicon Valley. Many of those developments bear review as governments’ and companies’ take on present complexities.

The complexities include more seemingly modest products than high-end processors, Miller indicated. Simpler chips that complement the hot processers grow in importance as well.

“The entire electronics supply chain is actually beginning to shift. It’s not only at the chip level, it’s also electronics assembly and simpler components,” Miller said, adding that a reduction in China’s level of server assembly has led to a major increase in Mexico’s market share in that field.

The also point emergence of new market dynamics as large companies take on design of their own chips, which could be spurred for a wider range of companies as US Chips Act R&D funding addresses the need for less expensive chip design processes.

A qubit for your thoughts

Infant quantum computing looms as an adjacent technology where geopolitical ambitions may play out.

China, the US the EU, and countries such as Australia, Singapore, and Canada now devote research monies to pursue such quantum efforts. They stir this new ground at the same time they test the limits of Moore’s Law – the perceived dead end for further large-scale silicon chip integration, which Tuft’s Miller cites as a fundamental challenge facing the chip industry.

However, quantum technology is still-raw technology – the quantum researchers on the main are still found toiling at the qubit level with lab rigs and signal scopes – that is, the quantum equivalent of the lone transistor work that preceded development of the Integrated Circuit.

A high-point of the Future Compute 2023 agenda for me was a visit to MIT’s Engineering Quantum Systems Group’s labs. Smart people are working hard on this frontier technology. And, with notable exceptions, there is knowledge sharing going on.

But, in a conference panel on quantum at the event, the impression emerged that quantum computing needed a large-scale working version of a quantum computer before the international competition for quantum computing would reach a less-sanguine stage akin to that the advanced CPU, GPU, NPU and network processing chips now experience.

For his part, at Future Compute, Chris Miller hesitated somewhat in responding to an audience question on quantum computing.

“I struggle to say anything that intelligent on quantum computing, both because I’m really not an expert in computing, but also because there’s a chip industry that I can study and I know how to talk about, whereas quantum computing is still a prospective industry,” he said. “We all hope it will materialize but it hasn’t materialized in a practical form.”

My take

Global chip wars must be viewed in the context of a real war underway in Ukraine. It has exposed the pivotal role of new technology in the exercise of war, as well as the vulnerability of the supply chains that feed modern commerce. It’s also pushed diplomacy to the sidelines, narrowing the opportunity for maneuver in the semiconductor straits.

Reporter’s Notebook: At Quantum.Tech 2023 in Boston

May 2, 2023 By Jack Vaughan

[Boston/May 2, 2023] — Its mainstream profile is a bit more modest than in recent years, but quantum computing today continues to inch forward, promising future breakthroughs based on the stranger properties of electrons, atoms, ions and photons.

Quantum computing advocates project a time when the binary-state bits of classical computing are surpassed – or complemented, in the case of the more forgiving futurists — by quantum qubits capable of handling multiple states. And venture funding is active. McKinsey estimates in 2022 investors put $2.35 billion into quantum tech start-ups. Recent weeks have seen investments on several continents. These include:

*Dell Technologies Capital announcing funding a $12M seed extension investment in Quantum Source, an Israel-based company pursing photonic quantum technologies;

*Molten Ventures, Altair, the National Security Strategic Investment Fund and others announcing a $16.5 million round for UK-based Riverlane, which creates software and hardware to address the problem of galloping error rates as machines scale up their qubit counts – a basic but incomplete measure of quantum processing; and

*Funding by ParticleX for Quantier, an off-shoot of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said to fashion laser lights to control atoms at room temperature.

The activity of governments in such funding is common and understandable. For them the risk of misspent money is outweighed by the risk of other countries gaining a potentially key technological edge.

The startups need funding, but also increasingly need to find immediate use cases, as the difficulties facing some quantum pioneers highlights. D-Wave and Rigetti Computing, both of which turned to SPAC vehicles to ply the public markets, have found themselves with somewhat curtailed money ramps, as disclosed in recent financial reports.

But enthusiasm is still strong, as witnessed at last week’s Quantum.Tech 2023 conference here. Emergent themes held that this is a global phenomenon important to nation states of all sizes, that qubit counts matter less than qubit quality, and that vendors and users alike are looking to move past the present era of noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing – that is to create more capable qubits in greater numbers.

Quantum computing scorecards are more than ever a jumble of types, as small labs come forward with completely different approaches to basic quantum computing processes. Where not that long ago superconducting and trapped-ion approaches were the main game, processing modalities  based on photonics, neutral atoms, and silicon-based spin methods now vie for attention.

Marathona est, non sprint

Manfred Rieck, VP, Individual Software Development, Deutsche Bahn, sees quantum efforts feeding other advanced computing efforts. He spoke at the Boston event on quantum computing, picturing it as the next part of multinationals’ tech stacks that may also include AI, IoT, big data and digital twins.

He suggested, for example, that quantum computers could help in building fine-grain simulations for digital twins that design and operate transportation in the future, speaking with us in an interview.

Rieck marks progress of late, as quantum efforts combining the work of both physicists and computer scientists move out of the university, and into industry.

Moreover, he sees the struggles of some quantum players as a natural thing that happens with quantum-tech startups.

“I think companies are coming in and going out of the game and sometimes it works and sometimes not. At the same time, you see more and more interest in what happens in large industries,” he said. For vendors and buyers alike, he advised, the focus should be less on ‘quantum’ and more on business benefits.

As part of that, customers will look to companies that have long-term management skills to complement their belief in quantum computing’s radical promise.

One notion Rieck disavows is that quantum computing is entering a down phase, one some liken to the season of “winter.” He prefers the runner’s analogy – the quantum journey is a marathon, not a sprint, he told Quantum Tech attendees.

Hybridization erit belli

For Florian Neukart, who was deeply involved in some early Volkswagen AG quantum work, hybridization is the next step. Hybridization combines quantum computing along with classical high-performance computing, according to Neukart, who now serves as chief product officer at Terra Quantum, which provides “Quantum as a Service” in the form of algorithmic, hardware and security offerings.

“When we say hybrid, it means combining these two efficiently using an operating system using hybrid algorithms that sit on top,” said Neukart, who took part in a panel discussion on quantum’s path to commercialization at Quantum Tech 2023.

The growth in approaches based on hybrids can be drowned out by the quantum technology community’s natural preoccupation with quantum processing chips. But they bear watching.

“For the current era, where the quantum computing devices are error-prone and not perfect, or as big as we want them to be, hybridization will be a strategy, and it will carry on into the future,” he  told us. Examples of hybridization in action are recently developed quantum algorithms St. Gallen, Switzerland-based Terra Quantum undertook with German specialty chemical firm Evonik Industries to improve fluid mixing simulations and shape optimization for production parts of mixers.

Neukart agrees with the contention that quantum computing’s near future will be more influenced by computer science community members than in the past.

“People in classical high-performance computing really know how to scale systems, how to operate these systems cost effectively,” he said. That same community also is familiar with the work involved in integrating new algorithms into an existing environment – which is also among the many hurdles the quantum computing crew is now facing.

Hortus curae tuae

A software platform intended to put quantum processing in the hands of a broad group of users is the objective of Austin, Texas-based Strangeworks. At the Boston event, the five-year-old company highlighted updates to its platform said to allow  subject matter experts to  access “a marketplace of pre-packaged applications for everything from optimization and kernel alignment to variational quantum eigensolvers and neural networks.”

This comes after recent completion of a $24-million funding round led by Hitachi Ventures, with investments from IBM, Raytheon, and others.

“We’ve added abstraction layers to make it easier for subject matter experts – and everybody else – to take advantage of these tools. Below them, developers can open up pre-packaged applications and change the parameters,” Strangeworks founder and CEO William ‘whurley’ Hurley told us at Quantum Tech 2023.

We asked how does Hurly gauge the progress or lack of progress with quantum computing today.

“The fact is, is these machines are useful today,” he responded. “They work for material design, a lot of chemistry problems. Finance is starting to really get its legs. But they don’t match anywhere near the hype the industry has put out about them.”

And, he’s not averse to the term ‘quantum winter.’ Hurley said a challenging economic climate can strengthen an industry now desperately in search of skilled talent.

“We are entering –  whether anybody wants to say or not – a quantum winter, and this is a good thing. Everybody associates a quantum winter, or a downturn in funding, or whatever,  as this big, dramatic event,” he said. “In reality, it’s kind of like pruning your rosebush, or taking care of your garden.” – Jack Vaughan

Sandia researcher pursues programming tricks to improve quantum computing’s chances

August 8, 2022 By Jack Vaughan

The Photon Box (1920s)

A grand sampling of today’s quantum movers and shakers shows many come from physics depts, R&D equipment makers, and the like, and that should remain the case for some time. This is one among many clues indicating the quantum computing industry is still struggling to be born. One foot is very much in the labs where quantum physics research has been going on for 10s of years.

A lot of work going on now has to do with moving particles and waves in ways that forward knowledge of the underlying quantum aspects of nature. It’s the stuff of headlines describing breakthroughs in Science and Nature magazines, as well as Nobel prizes. Manipulating things subatomic – it’s still not quite commonplace activity.

A news release from Sandia National Labs provides a glimpse into what goes on as researchers strive to scale-up quantum computing beyond the original test beds. From Sandia comes word that the Dept of Energy Office of Science has conferred a five-year Early Career Research Program Award grant to Timothy Proctor to improve the quantum computer programs now being devised at the honored research labs. A look at Proctor’s work discloses some of the friction points with which ‘quantumists’ must deal.

Proctor came to Sandia via Leeds University, where he explored a variety of techniques for creating computational quantum gates. A lot of that work has to do with creating operating system software that manages new types of hardware and communications. Error correction, boot order, and other operational traits that were fairly suitably solved some time ago in classical computing are still frontier undertakings for the quantum kind.

These days, he is looking at how commands are arranged and structured and what effect different approaches have on computing accuracy. That use case, in fact, is one of the key ones that fledgling quantum software houses are pursuing. Not surprisingly, comparing results on highly divergent quantum computing types is the first order of business for many who are just now dipping toes in the water.

As part of their public debates on physics in the 1920s Einstein and Bohrs did thought experiments. After all, there was no apparatus to separate, observe and manipulate atomic and sub-atomic particles. So, they used their minds. Laboratory rigs accomplish those experiments today – but the scale does not yet match the scale where quantum computing dependably scales beyond today’s best systems. When will that change? Work like Proctor’s algorithmic efforts will yield clues. – Jack Vaughan

Related
https://newsreleases.sandia.gov/proctor_award/
https://qpl.sandia.gov

 

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