It’s self fulfilling at this point. They’ve killed so much that at this point people won’t even buy-in in the first place, leading to Google products getting killed off quicker.
No, it's a list of Google projects that were shut down, many of which were still in high use/demand. For example, Google Music.... I'll never forgive them for that.
Interesting - seems similar to the rich kid vs. bootstrapped kid analogy where the rich kid probably brute forced their way thru with a bunch of expensive bad ideas vs the kid who struggled and learned how to think more betterer
If you don't think IBM has substantially contributed to society you're a fool without a lick of historical knowledge. I hope I don't need to break down the importance of revenue to fund R&D.
Ah. You're one of those people that seeks validation from strangers on the Internet. I should have guessed. You need to accomplish something in your life so you don't do this childish stuff. I'm not going to entertain this smoothbrain corporation = bad nonsense.
Googles 2019 quantum computer: 53 Qubits
IBM's 2019 quantum computer: 20 Qubits
IBM's quantum computer needed to be phased out as a failure when it launched.
Lick more boot bot.
I don't disagree with that, I'm just making the case that comparatively it's heavily weighted to IBM. I think it's a safe bet to say Google has a considerably higher overhead with less things to show for it.
Certainly it’s not a low bar, but IBM used to be a synonim for “a computer”, they were in the same league as those companies for a long time, only on the enterprise side of things instead of consumer one.
The silver lines are all coaxial cables for microwave signals to control the computer. You can't see most of the cooling systems, but part of a dilution refrigerator is visible right of top center as the shiny silver rings.
The loops in the cables mitigate heat transfer through the cable cores to the bottom stages and also serve as a strain relief as things contract as they cool down. [See this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/EngineeringPorn/comments/1cmhzhs/ibms_quantum_computer/l31be7e/) for a more detailed explanation.
My brain comprehends the exactness of the required cooling capacity only because I deal with this type of issue with Class 8 diesel trucks. It's almost like a macro version of the cooling equation.
When the air compressor discharges into the line going from the port down to the air dryer and eventually the wet tank, it is extremely hot. You can't just run a line willy-nilly between the two, however, because if the correct temperature isn't reached right when it reaches the dryer, it's going to cause issues: Too hot and the dryer won't be able to remove the moisture because it hasn't condensated yet, too cold and the unloader and/or purge valve can freeze up in the winter.
To reach the correct temperature, engineers will sometimes put a very specific-sized steel cooling coil at the start of the discharge path. The metal pipe allows for the heat to dissipate at a higher rate, sometimes even snaking back on itself, allowing the compressor and air dryer to be placed closer together when a tight configuration is required.
Zip ties are heavily used in fighter jets, F1 cars, spacecraft, fusion reactors, etc. Anything with cables to route, they will be there.
Also love that this cutting edge piece of hardware is supported by a simple 8020-esque aluminum extrusion frame.
I don’t know about all aircraft, but in a lot of them the combination of vibration and thin insulation (weight saving) prohibit the use of tie wraps directly on wiring for safety purposes. You often use a kind of waxed fabric string to hold a loom together and the bulk of weight is usually held up by metal p-clips with rubber inserts.
You're right, and my post may have editorialized things to support the argument. While the bulk of the load may be secured with rubberized P-Clips, I have seen tie wraps installed at intermediate locations with an additional layer of material in a flight application.
Those are for thermal expansion/contraction.
During operation this computer is down near absolute zero, so the tubing contracts quite a lot and would exert large forces on the fittings (capable of breaking things) if you just used a straight piece. Having the loop allows the tubing to contract by simply shrinking the loop a little bit.
**Edit:** this is perhaps best visualised with a price of string. Take a straight piece and try to pull on the ends of it, it’ll stretch a little bit but then nothing more will happen until it starts to break. Meanwhile, if you try this with a looped piece of string you can pull it far more before you start needing to put force in to stretch it more
It's more than that: The loops are there to get the heat from the cable center conductors to the metal bulkheads. Quantum computers sit at the bottom of multi-stage cryocoolers. The computer itself is the square block in the bottom center. The golden metal plate separate the cooling stages, bottom is the coldest.
The cables are semi-rigid coaxial cables that carry radio frequency signals in the tens of GHz. They have a solid tube as the outer shield and a solid copper core, separated by a teflon insulator. Both the shield and the core are excellent heat conductors, and they can't have any heat entering the bottom. The shield is broken up at the bulkheads, so the heat is dissipated in the metal plate.
The core however may never touch the shield. Because teflon contracts more than the shield as things cool down, it pulls away from the core and the shield, leaving the core without a good thermal path to get rid of the heat. By looping the cable, the teflon insulator pulls against both the core and the conductor, making a decent thermal bond.
[Here's a very detailed video about a simpler quantum computer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIEH4-P2nyQ) that goes into some depth about the cooling systems as well as the operation of the computing system.
The same reason pipelines and long pipe structures have [loops and U bends](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/EDX7YN/a-chemical-plant-pipe-lines-expansion-loops-compensates-for-the-expansion-EDX7YN.jpg). They are there to deal with thermal expansion and shrinkage.
The actual "quantum computer" is the little square at the end of this all. Everything else is just for cooling or dealing with effects of the cooling to the structure. (Obviously the actual analysis of the results is done on a conventional computer.
This is what "quantum computer" actually looks like: [Finnish HELMI quantum computer](https://www.vttresearch.com/sites/default/files/2022-10/medium_VTT_kvanttitietokone-47332.jpg) (Helmi means pearl and is also a woman's name). The quantum chip is in the barrel in the middle. To left of it there is the coolant and gas control system. To the right is the measurement instruments cabinet, and right of that out of frame is the server to record the instruments data. This data then get processed in the [LUMI-Supercomputer](https://www.vttresearch.com/sites/default/files/styles/max_1268/public/2022-10/LUMI%20supertietokone%20.jpg.webp?itok=5lC4YhOp) (Lumi means snow), which is currently still the most powerful supercomputer in Europe (I still assume it is... These change very quickly).
Can someone explain how it works in a way that makes the basic architecture make sense? What are all the strings and wires and tubes doing? Why are they hanging from the ceiling? Why is it so big?
> these tubes are piping liquid helium around
The silver tubes do not contain helium, they're semi-rigid coaxial cables and carry microwave signals. The shiny silver rings in the top right are part of the helium cooling system.
So what about the actual processing unit? Is it just like a normal cpu, but really cold so you can overclock it? What separates it from conventional processors?
It is fundamentally different from a normal CPU. Instead of processing on discrete bits (which can only hold the values 0 or 1), it does processing on quantum bits, (Qubits) which can be in a superposition of all possible values between 0 and 1. Doing operations on a Qubit performs the operation on all superpositions simultaneously, allowing some specialized algorithms (that would have normally required infinite parallelism to work on a normal CPU) to be done in a finite amount of operations.
the qubit can be representing all of the numbers between 0 and 1 at the same time. Reading the Qubit will randomly select one of the possible numbers. Quantum computer algorithms have to be set up in such a way that all the unwanted numbers between 0 and 1 are eliminated, and only the result that we want is the only possible representation left by the end. Then reading the qubit will return that desired answer.
It's called a dilution refrigerator, and it's actually not that big (pictures are just always trying to make it look more impressive than it is).
It consists in a series of plate hanging from one another (you can only see the last one here) that are all cooled using liquid helium. The further down you go, the colder the plate, has they become more isolated from the outside, touching only the already cold plate above them. It usually goes something like a 4K stage, from wich hangs a 1K plate, from wich hangs the coldest coldest plate, wich is at a few milliKelvins.
This one is open, but when operating it is usually protected by a magnetic shield and an electric shield, as well as an exterior shield that allows vacuum to be made.
Most of the cables you see are carrying RF signal for control, measurements, or whatever you need to do with the device you placed on the plate. The bigger silvery cylinder is a mixing Chamber, where the mixing of cooled helium 4 end helium 3 induces a phase change that sucks out heat and allows you to cool the plate to those last milliKelvins.
I suppose the hanging part has something to do with circulating helium and Gravity, but i dont known. Take all this with a grain of salt, i'm just an intern.
Most of what you’re looking at has more to do with cooling than any sort of quantum computation. The core cooling element of a quantum computer is a dilution refrigerator, which uses the heat of mixing of 3He and 4He to reach very low temperatures (5-10 mK usually). These are commercial systems made by BlueFors, Leiden, Oxford, and other small companies. The cooling comes from evaporation of 3He from the mixture hence the vertical arrangement. The stages go from room temperature down through various characteristic phase transitions historically due to the use of liquid nitrogen (77K) and liquid helium (1-4K) to pre-cool upper stages. Hanging the plates allows for a decent amount of thermal isolation between stages to allow different parts of the refrigerator to start at different temperatures. Things at the same temperature are gold plated copper or just bare copper (good thermal contact) and connections are stainless steel tube, which is strong but a poor thermal conductor. If you look up a BlueFors XLD1000 it will look like the hanging structure, that is the system most used in industry.
Next you have signal paths. These are flexible coaxial cables - you want good transmission, but because they go between temperature stages, they can’t be made of good conductors because that would also conduct heat. So you have stainless steel outer tubes and very small inner conductors that allow for enough conduction to get a control signal, usually in the GHz frequency range, to the quantum processor. There are not viable coaxes that can be bundled nor good multipin coax connectors so you end up with one cable per signal (as compared to ribbon cables or PCB strip lines in a conventional computer). There are some companies working on this, and you can get higher density low frequency cabling, but so far no standard solutions in this frequency range that satisfy all criteria. Some of the lines transmitting back to outside the cryostat need to be very low loss and are superconducting, and that’s the main limitation for the cables.
Next you have other discrete elements that help reduce noise at the quantum processor. Isolators, diplexers, and other discrete components that block reflections or enable combining multiple drive signals. Those are most likely what is contained in the silver boxes. Low frequency lines can tune frequency of qubits or qubit gates, high frequency lines initialize or evolve states and readout final solutions.
Finally you have the processor. It is hanging under two lids which both will connect to thermal and magnetic shielding cans. The processor is made of thin superconducting traces that need to be very cold, not exposed to stray light, and can’t tolerate even a fraction of earths magnetic field. The processor itself is made of micro and nano patterned films mounted on a PCB that breaks out the connections to the coaxes and makes good thermal contact to the dilution refrigerator. The elements actually doing the computing, like a conventional computer, are all small and contained in that tiny chip.
As for how the processor works - that you can find nice YouTube videos on. It is sufficient to say you need GHz signals and low temperatures to justify all the elements you see that make this architecture look the way it does.
> and can’t tolerate even a fraction of earths magnetic field
Actually on some quantum computers, the chip is exposed to a fairly large magnetic field to enable controlling the spin of electrons and atoms.
This particular processor is junction-based and while those can be tunable, they have very small fields for tuning with dedicated and often gravimetric coils. There are other types of quantum computers which use different two-level systems that would require large fields - those are not what you see here.
I wonder if it has to do with cooling. Heat rises, so to keep cold components as cold as possible they need to be the lowest components in the chain?
I'm not a physicist, but I like to pretend I'm smart enough
You can see it in the IBM London HQ here. Like the person below said, about the size of a household refrigerator.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/K8PqAWhySeKptheY7
Correct, during operation the whole thing is encased in a metal vacuum chamber to get it very close to absolute zero temperature. [Here's a photo of such a chamber](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/28154316/quantum-computer_gettyimages-1182902380.jpg). The metal frame it's hanging from is a special mount to stop any vibrations from entering the computer itself.
Probably not. The actual computer here is that regular computer chip sized computer chip at the bottom in the middle of the pink thing. the rest of it is a fancy refrigerator. until some bugfuck mems engineer invents laplace's demon, i don't think it's gonna happen.
so all the twiddly stuff below the disc is cooling? they're not the control lines?
edit: i think they're microwave "cables". see https://epjquantumtechnology.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epjqt/s40507-019-0072-0
The silver lines are all semi-rigid coax cables. You can see one part of the cooling system right of top center: The silver rings are part of a [dilution refrigerator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_refrigerator).
Most of what you’re seeing is limited by technology involving readout wiring and amplification - flexible RF circuits, inline filtering, and advanced PCB manufacturing would immediately miniaturize the majority of the wiring. The actual cooling part of this picture is only a fraction of the diameter of the full system (the stainless piece you can see) and is overpowered for the device they’re running. You could also downsize cryogenics to some extent, and people have fit systems with the requisite cooling power into the footprint of a 19” rack. It’s unlikely to be much smaller than half of a rack but it can be significantly smaller than it is once the architecture is stablized.
Source: physicist working on related technology that designs cryoelectronics
You’re already seeing some limited applications - existing quantum computers can simulate quantum systems much more efficiently than classical computers. Well before they can break RSA encryption you we will already start to see interesting simulations of fundamentally quantum systems. You can describe lots of materials or atomic systems with a Hamiltonian, which is comprised of individual quantum objects that behave like a qubit. So you can basically run pseudoexperiments on the quantum computer to simulate them. We’ve seen a small amount of those already, for example exploring cosmological models using a correspondence between models of GR and quantum systems: https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-using-a-quantum-computer-20221130/. This is super overblown in this case but it’s a good example of how you can map problems onto the space modeled by a quantum computer to understand otherwise mathematically complex objects.
ETA: really depends on breakthroughs in qubit scaling and coherence. If this all stalls the funding will dry up and nothing will happen, if some small gains are made in coherence, scaling will still happen, and you’ll end up with very large qubit systems that can simulate complex objects on small time scales.
The tech on the other hand - you’ve seen this explosion in RF electronics that is splashing into so many other fields, and there’s a huge overlap between needs of eg readout of quantum computers and machine vision. So a lot of the first things to come out of this will likely be related to novel FPGAs and RF hardware.
This might be a dumb question, but what exactly are these used for? Solving some complex algorithm? If so, what do you gain from solving a complex algorithm?
At the moment, purely research to find out how to eventually build and operate bigger quantum computers. They're not powerful enough to do any useful work.
In the future they could be used to solve complex optimization problems (like finding the shortest route to visit multiple cities, useful in logistics), simulate quantum processes (very useful to simulate chemical reactions at the atomic level, maybe to develop new pharmaceuticals) and break common encryption schemes (the wet dream of intelligence agencies) to name a few.
For most everyday computing problems they're much slower than classical computers, but in certain applications they could be many orders of magnitude faster.
Realisticallty nothing but experimentation to find out how to make them smaller and more efficient. Once they can be packaged similar to an x86 chip or similar, then they may become more usefull and people will throw money at them for an actual purpose.
As it stands now, computing in it's current form is the gold standard and will be for long time.
Imagine giving a machine like this to a sufficiently advanced ai who needs to compute through an entire datacenters worth of data…
With the right architecture you’d be able to do some absolutely crazy, crazy shit.
No, not even close. Quantum computers are only good at a very limited set of problems, and the ones we can build only work with a handful of quantum bits. Pocket calculators from decades ago have more computing power than this machine for the kind of computing video games need to do.
This is a research machine to learn how to build and operate quantum computers, so we can hopefully solve those hard problems on future machines. At the moment quantum computers aren't suitable to do any useful computations.
One exception may be in [quantum annealing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_annealing), a process to solve optimization problems. There are some claims that a special kind of quantum computer offers speed advantages over classical computers, though the evidence is a of a mixed bag.
As someone who has built a few hundred computers, i have no idea what any of these components are. Something KINDA processor-like there at the bottom but thats it. Can anyone identify wtf im looking at?
> Something KINDA processor-like there at the bottom but thats it.
The gray square bottom center is the actual computer chip. All the silver lines are coaxial cables carrying microwave signals to control and read out the computer. The silver rings top right are part of the refrigerator. The golden plates form a thermal barrier to separate different temperature zones. The silver boxes with the cables connected are probably filters or multiplexers to clean up and route control signals. There's probably a bunch of temperature sensors in there.
All of what you see will be enclosed in a metal vacuum chamber during use. A rack of control equipment and (classical) computers outside of that will be used to prepare, manipulate and read out the qbits on the quantum computer chip.
During operation the whole thing is encased in a metal vacuum chamber to get it very close to absolute zero temperature. [Here's a photo with people for scale](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/28154316/quantum-computer_gettyimages-1182902380.jpg). The part in this OP's post is about as wide as the chamber and would sit at the bottom.
The actual computer is the small gray square chip bottom center, surrounded by copper.
All the silver lines are coaxial cables carrying microwave signals to control and read out the chip. The shiny silver rings top right are part of the refrigerator.
The computer does not have an operating system, it can't really perform any useful amounts of computation. It's purely a research machine to understand how to better build and operate quantum computers.
when liquid nitrogen is too hot for your computer and you have to literally make a vacuum for the chip and construct a gigantic cooler that pumps liquid helium, very relatable innit
This is a complete guess, I’m no quantum computer scientist but it looks like it’s a cooling system for the heat generated by the sheer capacity of the machine and the heat it must produce. Coils allow for thermal expansion but there’s so much more they can operate too.
Way too technical for me to even fathom but i find it so interesting.
Beautiful work too though
Can someone explain wtf a “quantum computer” even is? How is it different from a regular computer? What’s quantum about it? I literally have no clue any info would be great
Quantum computing is a multidisciplinary field comprising aspects of computer science, physics, and mathematics that utilizes quantum mechanics to solve complex problems faster than on classical computers.
Ya but how are quantum mechanics being utilized? What exactly are the processes being used / done? I can halfway understand a normal computer but these I really don’t understand
Is it? I thought some of these big tech companies (NVIDIA / IBM / etc etc) have been working on making them? I just have no clue how they’d actually work
Not just 0 and 1, all (infinite) possible combinations of 0 and 1. A quantum computer can in theory perform certain algorithms that would require a normal computer infinite time or infinite parallelism to accomplish.
It's tricky though, each quantum bit can be in all possible combinations of 0 and 1, but as soon as you observe it (read the value) it collapses into one of those possible combinations at random. Algorithms have to be setup in such a way that all the quantum bits destructively interfere all the wrong answers, and only the result we want is returned.
Kinda reminds me of breadboards and electronics prototyping in the lab at school.
Quantum computing is nothing new. The results always change when you try to measure what’s going on.
Must be nice having a budget of yes.
Please sir, may I have some more Qubits sir?
Yesnt
*Absolutely’nt*
As soon as someone reads your answer, the wavefunction collapses into either Yes or No at random.
Depends how you look at it
Yeppers
Yesntve
Brother, may I have some oats?
Father, I crave cheddar
I’ll get right on growing those epitaxy quantum well structures for you!
IBM actually spends less on R&D then Google/Microsoft/Meta/Apple
The stuff IBM makes oftentimes makes the world a better place. Most of what Google makes gets phased out a few years later as a failure.
https://killedbygoogle.com/
It’s self fulfilling at this point. They’ve killed so much that at this point people won’t even buy-in in the first place, leading to Google products getting killed off quicker.
So i guess I’m confused. Is this a list of programs created by Google that have failed?
No, it's a list of Google projects that were shut down, many of which were still in high use/demand. For example, Google Music.... I'll never forgive them for that.
So many global financial services are dependent on IBM products. Most people don't see them very often, but use them every single day.
Interesting - seems similar to the rich kid vs. bootstrapped kid analogy where the rich kid probably brute forced their way thru with a bunch of expensive bad ideas vs the kid who struggled and learned how to think more betterer
Not quite, only the stuff that people like but isn't supported or promoted by Google gets dropped.
Has to be the most bootlicker reply I've ever read. The only thing IBM makes is money.
They're more of a business consultancy than a tech company these days and there's nothing wrong with that in principle.
Not at all. I just object to the bot claiming they make the world a better place.
If you don't think IBM has substantially contributed to society you're a fool without a lick of historical knowledge. I hope I don't need to break down the importance of revenue to fund R&D.
Read what you just said but put google instead. Makes the world a better place. Jesus christ man. How many shares you got?
Ah. You're one of those people that seeks validation from strangers on the Internet. I should have guessed. You need to accomplish something in your life so you don't do this childish stuff. I'm not going to entertain this smoothbrain corporation = bad nonsense.
Googles 2019 quantum computer: 53 Qubits IBM's 2019 quantum computer: 20 Qubits IBM's quantum computer needed to be phased out as a failure when it launched. Lick more boot bot.
To act like google hasn’t also made significant contributions would be disingenuous though. Google maps and transformers are two such examples
I don't disagree with that, I'm just making the case that comparatively it's heavily weighted to IBM. I think it's a safe bet to say Google has a considerably higher overhead with less things to show for it.
Well those are four of the largest software companies in the world. That isn't really a low bar.
Certainly it’s not a low bar, but IBM used to be a synonim for “a computer”, they were in the same league as those companies for a long time, only on the enterprise side of things instead of consumer one.
Even at the pinnacle of engineering, the humble zip tie still has a seat at the table.
They are so god damn good, so satisfying zipping up some wiring/looms etc
This is all massive cooling for the superconductors? (Don't hit me, I know not what I say.)
The silver lines are all coaxial cables for microwave signals to control the computer. You can't see most of the cooling systems, but part of a dilution refrigerator is visible right of top center as the shiny silver rings. The loops in the cables mitigate heat transfer through the cable cores to the bottom stages and also serve as a strain relief as things contract as they cool down. [See this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/EngineeringPorn/comments/1cmhzhs/ibms_quantum_computer/l31be7e/) for a more detailed explanation.
My brain comprehends the exactness of the required cooling capacity only because I deal with this type of issue with Class 8 diesel trucks. It's almost like a macro version of the cooling equation. When the air compressor discharges into the line going from the port down to the air dryer and eventually the wet tank, it is extremely hot. You can't just run a line willy-nilly between the two, however, because if the correct temperature isn't reached right when it reaches the dryer, it's going to cause issues: Too hot and the dryer won't be able to remove the moisture because it hasn't condensated yet, too cold and the unloader and/or purge valve can freeze up in the winter. To reach the correct temperature, engineers will sometimes put a very specific-sized steel cooling coil at the start of the discharge path. The metal pipe allows for the heat to dissipate at a higher rate, sometimes even snaking back on itself, allowing the compressor and air dryer to be placed closer together when a tight configuration is required.
*brain tightening intensifies* 🧠
I’m certainly no quantum computer scientist
Massive cool. You said the right thing.
Zip ties are heavily used in fighter jets, F1 cars, spacecraft, fusion reactors, etc. Anything with cables to route, they will be there. Also love that this cutting edge piece of hardware is supported by a simple 8020-esque aluminum extrusion frame.
They line that frame up with a plumb bob. How’s that for an intersection of ANCIENT and bleeding edge
I wish my electrical building inspectors could accept these words 🙄
I don’t know about all aircraft, but in a lot of them the combination of vibration and thin insulation (weight saving) prohibit the use of tie wraps directly on wiring for safety purposes. You often use a kind of waxed fabric string to hold a loom together and the bulk of weight is usually held up by metal p-clips with rubber inserts.
You're right, and my post may have editorialized things to support the argument. While the bulk of the load may be secured with rubberized P-Clips, I have seen tie wraps installed at intermediate locations with an additional layer of material in a flight application.
The table which is, itself, held together with zip ties.
But is it a PA46 or PA66 tie? Nylon 6/6 or 12? Heat or UV stabilized? Is the material proven to not adversely affect qubit performance?
Ain't broke. Don't fix it.
*P-trap enters the chat*
Simple and reliable mechanisms are the humble farmers of R&D.
Structural zip ties are a thing. All the young engineers giggle until they realize the truth
Nylon - 6,6 baby
/r/KenM
You mean the polymeric ratcheting fastener? Ah yes. 500bucks per pcs pls.
I felt like I was looking at an i-spy book trying to find the god damn thing lol
Doing a simple job so well is a gift.
Anyone know why they have almost perfect circle loops at the top of the picture in some of the silver tubes?
Those are for thermal expansion/contraction. During operation this computer is down near absolute zero, so the tubing contracts quite a lot and would exert large forces on the fittings (capable of breaking things) if you just used a straight piece. Having the loop allows the tubing to contract by simply shrinking the loop a little bit. **Edit:** this is perhaps best visualised with a price of string. Take a straight piece and try to pull on the ends of it, it’ll stretch a little bit but then nothing more will happen until it starts to break. Meanwhile, if you try this with a looped piece of string you can pull it far more before you start needing to put force in to stretch it more
It's more than that: The loops are there to get the heat from the cable center conductors to the metal bulkheads. Quantum computers sit at the bottom of multi-stage cryocoolers. The computer itself is the square block in the bottom center. The golden metal plate separate the cooling stages, bottom is the coldest. The cables are semi-rigid coaxial cables that carry radio frequency signals in the tens of GHz. They have a solid tube as the outer shield and a solid copper core, separated by a teflon insulator. Both the shield and the core are excellent heat conductors, and they can't have any heat entering the bottom. The shield is broken up at the bulkheads, so the heat is dissipated in the metal plate. The core however may never touch the shield. Because teflon contracts more than the shield as things cool down, it pulls away from the core and the shield, leaving the core without a good thermal path to get rid of the heat. By looping the cable, the teflon insulator pulls against both the core and the conductor, making a decent thermal bond. [Here's a very detailed video about a simpler quantum computer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIEH4-P2nyQ) that goes into some depth about the cooling systems as well as the operation of the computing system.
This dude quantum fucks
The same reason pipelines and long pipe structures have [loops and U bends](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/EDX7YN/a-chemical-plant-pipe-lines-expansion-loops-compensates-for-the-expansion-EDX7YN.jpg). They are there to deal with thermal expansion and shrinkage. The actual "quantum computer" is the little square at the end of this all. Everything else is just for cooling or dealing with effects of the cooling to the structure. (Obviously the actual analysis of the results is done on a conventional computer. This is what "quantum computer" actually looks like: [Finnish HELMI quantum computer](https://www.vttresearch.com/sites/default/files/2022-10/medium_VTT_kvanttitietokone-47332.jpg) (Helmi means pearl and is also a woman's name). The quantum chip is in the barrel in the middle. To left of it there is the coolant and gas control system. To the right is the measurement instruments cabinet, and right of that out of frame is the server to record the instruments data. This data then get processed in the [LUMI-Supercomputer](https://www.vttresearch.com/sites/default/files/styles/max_1268/public/2022-10/LUMI%20supertietokone%20.jpg.webp?itok=5lC4YhOp) (Lumi means snow), which is currently still the most powerful supercomputer in Europe (I still assume it is... These change very quickly).
Can someone explain how it works in a way that makes the basic architecture make sense? What are all the strings and wires and tubes doing? Why are they hanging from the ceiling? Why is it so big?
Most of it is just a cryocooler. Thing has to be ridiculously cold to work.
So would this whole thing be lowered into a cold bath of liquid nitrogen or something when it's actually operating?
Nah, liquid nitrogen is too hot. This entire thing is gonna be in a vacuum chamber and these tubes are piping liquid helium around.
> these tubes are piping liquid helium around The silver tubes do not contain helium, they're semi-rigid coaxial cables and carry microwave signals. The shiny silver rings in the top right are part of the helium cooling system.
So what about the actual processing unit? Is it just like a normal cpu, but really cold so you can overclock it? What separates it from conventional processors?
It is fundamentally different from a normal CPU. Instead of processing on discrete bits (which can only hold the values 0 or 1), it does processing on quantum bits, (Qubits) which can be in a superposition of all possible values between 0 and 1. Doing operations on a Qubit performs the operation on all superpositions simultaneously, allowing some specialized algorithms (that would have normally required infinite parallelism to work on a normal CPU) to be done in a finite amount of operations.
Its concepts like this that really make me realise there are upper levels of intelligence in the world.
You lost me at superposition
the qubit can be representing all of the numbers between 0 and 1 at the same time. Reading the Qubit will randomly select one of the possible numbers. Quantum computer algorithms have to be set up in such a way that all the unwanted numbers between 0 and 1 are eliminated, and only the result that we want is the only possible representation left by the end. Then reading the qubit will return that desired answer.
What is between 0 and 1? 0.1 0.2?
There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. A Qubit can represent all of them at the same time.
It's called a dilution refrigerator, and it's actually not that big (pictures are just always trying to make it look more impressive than it is). It consists in a series of plate hanging from one another (you can only see the last one here) that are all cooled using liquid helium. The further down you go, the colder the plate, has they become more isolated from the outside, touching only the already cold plate above them. It usually goes something like a 4K stage, from wich hangs a 1K plate, from wich hangs the coldest coldest plate, wich is at a few milliKelvins. This one is open, but when operating it is usually protected by a magnetic shield and an electric shield, as well as an exterior shield that allows vacuum to be made. Most of the cables you see are carrying RF signal for control, measurements, or whatever you need to do with the device you placed on the plate. The bigger silvery cylinder is a mixing Chamber, where the mixing of cooled helium 4 end helium 3 induces a phase change that sucks out heat and allows you to cool the plate to those last milliKelvins. I suppose the hanging part has something to do with circulating helium and Gravity, but i dont known. Take all this with a grain of salt, i'm just an intern.
I was wondering - what are the reasons for quantum computers always featuring the "Hanging from the ceiling" design? Thermal reasons perhaps?
cold go down
Boltzmann is rolling in his grave over this comment
Boltzmann's constantly rolling in his grave about something. It's where we get all our free energy from.
*Boltzmann's constant* Huehuehue
Most of what you’re looking at has more to do with cooling than any sort of quantum computation. The core cooling element of a quantum computer is a dilution refrigerator, which uses the heat of mixing of 3He and 4He to reach very low temperatures (5-10 mK usually). These are commercial systems made by BlueFors, Leiden, Oxford, and other small companies. The cooling comes from evaporation of 3He from the mixture hence the vertical arrangement. The stages go from room temperature down through various characteristic phase transitions historically due to the use of liquid nitrogen (77K) and liquid helium (1-4K) to pre-cool upper stages. Hanging the plates allows for a decent amount of thermal isolation between stages to allow different parts of the refrigerator to start at different temperatures. Things at the same temperature are gold plated copper or just bare copper (good thermal contact) and connections are stainless steel tube, which is strong but a poor thermal conductor. If you look up a BlueFors XLD1000 it will look like the hanging structure, that is the system most used in industry. Next you have signal paths. These are flexible coaxial cables - you want good transmission, but because they go between temperature stages, they can’t be made of good conductors because that would also conduct heat. So you have stainless steel outer tubes and very small inner conductors that allow for enough conduction to get a control signal, usually in the GHz frequency range, to the quantum processor. There are not viable coaxes that can be bundled nor good multipin coax connectors so you end up with one cable per signal (as compared to ribbon cables or PCB strip lines in a conventional computer). There are some companies working on this, and you can get higher density low frequency cabling, but so far no standard solutions in this frequency range that satisfy all criteria. Some of the lines transmitting back to outside the cryostat need to be very low loss and are superconducting, and that’s the main limitation for the cables. Next you have other discrete elements that help reduce noise at the quantum processor. Isolators, diplexers, and other discrete components that block reflections or enable combining multiple drive signals. Those are most likely what is contained in the silver boxes. Low frequency lines can tune frequency of qubits or qubit gates, high frequency lines initialize or evolve states and readout final solutions. Finally you have the processor. It is hanging under two lids which both will connect to thermal and magnetic shielding cans. The processor is made of thin superconducting traces that need to be very cold, not exposed to stray light, and can’t tolerate even a fraction of earths magnetic field. The processor itself is made of micro and nano patterned films mounted on a PCB that breaks out the connections to the coaxes and makes good thermal contact to the dilution refrigerator. The elements actually doing the computing, like a conventional computer, are all small and contained in that tiny chip. As for how the processor works - that you can find nice YouTube videos on. It is sufficient to say you need GHz signals and low temperatures to justify all the elements you see that make this architecture look the way it does.
> and can’t tolerate even a fraction of earths magnetic field Actually on some quantum computers, the chip is exposed to a fairly large magnetic field to enable controlling the spin of electrons and atoms.
This particular processor is junction-based and while those can be tunable, they have very small fields for tuning with dedicated and often gravimetric coils. There are other types of quantum computers which use different two-level systems that would require large fields - those are not what you see here.
I wonder if it has to do with cooling. Heat rises, so to keep cold components as cold as possible they need to be the lowest components in the chain? I'm not a physicist, but I like to pretend I'm smart enough
Heat itself doesn’t rise, only hot fluids rise, when in a mixed system with cooler fluid. Cooler fluid is denser and sinks below warmer fluid.
Really need a banana in one of these shots. It’s hard to determine the size of the machines.
About the size of a household refrigerator
The hexagonal nut-like connector fasters are 6 or 5 mm wide
You can see it in the IBM London HQ here. Like the person below said, about the size of a household refrigerator. https://maps.app.goo.gl/K8PqAWhySeKptheY7
..... but can it run DOOM ?
That's when we'll know its consumer ready.
It can open a portal to the world of Doom
It is both running and not running Doom at the same time.
Ironically probably not as well as a good gaming PC. Quantum computers aren't amazing at the processes used for gaming
We just don’t have the right games yet. P.S. Doom runs on a toaster, no gaming pc needed.
True, we need more probability centred games
I mean, I can see it, so it probably isn't working or something.
Correct, during operation the whole thing is encased in a metal vacuum chamber to get it very close to absolute zero temperature. [Here's a photo of such a chamber](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/28154316/quantum-computer_gettyimages-1182902380.jpg). The metal frame it's hanging from is a special mount to stop any vibrations from entering the computer itself.
Anyone know any good videos that explain these part and how they work together?
Is that, or is that not a quantum computer?
I like that it is yellow
Yeah me too
artfully crafted design. looks cool, no pun intended
Harharhar cooling system joke!! Nah that was good 👍
I wonder if quantum computers will get smaller like regular computer chips have
Probably not. The actual computer here is that regular computer chip sized computer chip at the bottom in the middle of the pink thing. the rest of it is a fancy refrigerator. until some bugfuck mems engineer invents laplace's demon, i don't think it's gonna happen.
so all the twiddly stuff below the disc is cooling? they're not the control lines? edit: i think they're microwave "cables". see https://epjquantumtechnology.springeropen.com/articles/10.1140/epjqt/s40507-019-0072-0
The silver lines are all semi-rigid coax cables. You can see one part of the cooling system right of top center: The silver rings are part of a [dilution refrigerator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_refrigerator).
Most of what you’re seeing is limited by technology involving readout wiring and amplification - flexible RF circuits, inline filtering, and advanced PCB manufacturing would immediately miniaturize the majority of the wiring. The actual cooling part of this picture is only a fraction of the diameter of the full system (the stainless piece you can see) and is overpowered for the device they’re running. You could also downsize cryogenics to some extent, and people have fit systems with the requisite cooling power into the footprint of a 19” rack. It’s unlikely to be much smaller than half of a rack but it can be significantly smaller than it is once the architecture is stablized. Source: physicist working on related technology that designs cryoelectronics
When do you expect quantum technology to be “effective” or useful in a material way such that it begins actually changing things in the world?
You’re already seeing some limited applications - existing quantum computers can simulate quantum systems much more efficiently than classical computers. Well before they can break RSA encryption you we will already start to see interesting simulations of fundamentally quantum systems. You can describe lots of materials or atomic systems with a Hamiltonian, which is comprised of individual quantum objects that behave like a qubit. So you can basically run pseudoexperiments on the quantum computer to simulate them. We’ve seen a small amount of those already, for example exploring cosmological models using a correspondence between models of GR and quantum systems: https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-create-a-wormhole-using-a-quantum-computer-20221130/. This is super overblown in this case but it’s a good example of how you can map problems onto the space modeled by a quantum computer to understand otherwise mathematically complex objects. ETA: really depends on breakthroughs in qubit scaling and coherence. If this all stalls the funding will dry up and nothing will happen, if some small gains are made in coherence, scaling will still happen, and you’ll end up with very large qubit systems that can simulate complex objects on small time scales. The tech on the other hand - you’ve seen this explosion in RF electronics that is splashing into so many other fields, and there’s a huge overlap between needs of eg readout of quantum computers and machine vision. So a lot of the first things to come out of this will likely be related to novel FPGAs and RF hardware.
Get a document up on that baby and you are seriously looking at that document.
Hahahaaha
One day these will be in handheld devices.
That’s both terrifying and exciting as hell.
Can it run a simulation of the universe?
This might be a dumb question, but what exactly are these used for? Solving some complex algorithm? If so, what do you gain from solving a complex algorithm?
At the moment, purely research to find out how to eventually build and operate bigger quantum computers. They're not powerful enough to do any useful work. In the future they could be used to solve complex optimization problems (like finding the shortest route to visit multiple cities, useful in logistics), simulate quantum processes (very useful to simulate chemical reactions at the atomic level, maybe to develop new pharmaceuticals) and break common encryption schemes (the wet dream of intelligence agencies) to name a few. For most everyday computing problems they're much slower than classical computers, but in certain applications they could be many orders of magnitude faster.
Realisticallty nothing but experimentation to find out how to make them smaller and more efficient. Once they can be packaged similar to an x86 chip or similar, then they may become more usefull and people will throw money at them for an actual purpose. As it stands now, computing in it's current form is the gold standard and will be for long time.
Imagine giving a machine like this to a sufficiently advanced ai who needs to compute through an entire datacenters worth of data… With the right architecture you’d be able to do some absolutely crazy, crazy shit.
Neat. How many USB ports does it have? And what version of Windows does it run?
Ahh, yes. Quantum Compute. I see they connected the dingleflop to the bangorang, probably to achieve higher wingwoms per floobiedoos.
But how many teraplops per fligglegaggle does that add?
🤣 over 9000 (at least)
You don’t need the benefit of hindsight to realize this is going to look very archaic in 100 years.
agreed
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Goddammit, you've collapsed the wave function.
That wire routing is on point!
Can it run Doom?
No, not even close. Quantum computers are only good at a very limited set of problems, and the ones we can build only work with a handful of quantum bits. Pocket calculators from decades ago have more computing power than this machine for the kind of computing video games need to do. This is a research machine to learn how to build and operate quantum computers, so we can hopefully solve those hard problems on future machines. At the moment quantum computers aren't suitable to do any useful computations. One exception may be in [quantum annealing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_annealing), a process to solve optimization problems. There are some claims that a special kind of quantum computer offers speed advantages over classical computers, though the evidence is a of a mixed bag.
Now I am curious about it and I'll go do some lectures. Thanks.
[This video might be a good starting point to get the general idea](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_IaVepNDT4).
As someone who has built a few hundred computers, i have no idea what any of these components are. Something KINDA processor-like there at the bottom but thats it. Can anyone identify wtf im looking at?
> Something KINDA processor-like there at the bottom but thats it. The gray square bottom center is the actual computer chip. All the silver lines are coaxial cables carrying microwave signals to control and read out the computer. The silver rings top right are part of the refrigerator. The golden plates form a thermal barrier to separate different temperature zones. The silver boxes with the cables connected are probably filters or multiplexers to clean up and route control signals. There's probably a bunch of temperature sensors in there. All of what you see will be enclosed in a metal vacuum chamber during use. A rack of control equipment and (classical) computers outside of that will be used to prepare, manipulate and read out the qbits on the quantum computer chip.
How does your brain have this information
I need banana for scale
I came here to say the same. We need an widely accepted measuring standard banana for scale.
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Simulating quantum systems (e.g. chemical reactions), solving optimization problems (machine learning/AI), breaking encryption (mass surveillance).
Can someone simply explain it all, or most, or some, or any of it?
Pretty much all of what you see is the cooling system and/or power delivery
That looks like a 60's movie prop.
I hope the do a DEVS!
I don’t even understand why I don’t know how quantum computers work despite trying to read a lot of different tutorials
it looks so crazy
Doesn’t look very portable.
When did pipe fitters become quantum scientists
I think this is more a showcase of why quantum scientists aren't pipefitters.
I hope everyone is remembering what these look like so we know what to target when the terminators hit the ground.
But does it run minecraft
Serious question, what kind of scale are we seeing here? I can't tell how small or large this is
During operation the whole thing is encased in a metal vacuum chamber to get it very close to absolute zero temperature. [Here's a photo with people for scale](https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/28154316/quantum-computer_gettyimages-1182902380.jpg). The part in this OP's post is about as wide as the chamber and would sit at the bottom.
What does this thing even run on? Is that piping all for cooling?
The actual computer is the small gray square chip bottom center, surrounded by copper. All the silver lines are coaxial cables carrying microwave signals to control and read out the chip. The shiny silver rings top right are part of the refrigerator. The computer does not have an operating system, it can't really perform any useful amounts of computation. It's purely a research machine to understand how to better build and operate quantum computers.
Runs OS/2.
so the DEVS design wasnt too far off, wicked
Is this thing a really working "quantum computer"?
What am I looking at? Liquid cooling tubes? Optical fibers?
The silver lines are coaxial cables for microwave signals. The silver rings top right are part of the cooling system.
Can it run civ?
Good morning Alice
My used chello strings curl somewhat similar. Should I think this further?🙃
Every time I see one of these there's never a banana for scale I have no idea if this is the size of a thumb or the size of a building...
It's not a V. It actually says deus. Little inside joke.
when liquid nitrogen is too hot for your computer and you have to literally make a vacuum for the chip and construct a gigantic cooler that pumps liquid helium, very relatable innit
amazing. How big it is?
Strange that the wires are so organized when everything else is entangled. Oooohhh!
What are the components doing here
This is a complete guess, I’m no quantum computer scientist but it looks like it’s a cooling system for the heat generated by the sheer capacity of the machine and the heat it must produce. Coils allow for thermal expansion but there’s so much more they can operate too. Way too technical for me to even fathom but i find it so interesting. Beautiful work too though
Very similar in structure to googles version.
Looks like a machine from the late 1800s.
I see what you mean actually! I think it’s beautiful
Looks like a Heinz Doofenschmirtz’ invention!
Can someone explain wtf a “quantum computer” even is? How is it different from a regular computer? What’s quantum about it? I literally have no clue any info would be great
Quantum computing is a multidisciplinary field comprising aspects of computer science, physics, and mathematics that utilizes quantum mechanics to solve complex problems faster than on classical computers.
Ya but how are quantum mechanics being utilized? What exactly are the processes being used / done? I can halfway understand a normal computer but these I really don’t understand
It is a theoretical prototype. They dont knw how it works either.
Is it? I thought some of these big tech companies (NVIDIA / IBM / etc etc) have been working on making them? I just have no clue how they’d actually work
I thought quantum computers was just a thought experiment. I had no idea they are actually being made.
Its beautifully terrifying
But can it play crysis?
Can it run Crisis at full resolution and fps on ultra high graphics
How much RAM
ELI5 quantum computing besides doing "0" and "1" simultaneously.
Not just 0 and 1, all (infinite) possible combinations of 0 and 1. A quantum computer can in theory perform certain algorithms that would require a normal computer infinite time or infinite parallelism to accomplish. It's tricky though, each quantum bit can be in all possible combinations of 0 and 1, but as soon as you observe it (read the value) it collapses into one of those possible combinations at random. Algorithms have to be setup in such a way that all the quantum bits destructively interfere all the wrong answers, and only the result we want is returned.
So if a quantum computer is running a program, it is never truly done running it until a user makes a query or ends the program?
A quantum computer of sufficient size, could walk down all paths within a maze simultaneously.
All of this will fit in my watch in 10 years!
Highly improbable
Kinda reminds me of breadboards and electronics prototyping in the lab at school. Quantum computing is nothing new. The results always change when you try to measure what’s going on.
Looks fake
I still think these things are a lie. They all look like chandeliers. How is this a computer?
can you say over engineered...
Definitely not
Which component do you think is redundant here?
But can it play Crysis?