Geordie Rose has written his observations about the benchmarking of the Dwave quantum system versus optimized classical systems.
Around May 15th of 2013 Google acquired a system built around a 509-qubit Vesuvius 6 (V6) chip. Since it went online, they have been running it 24/7 at 100% usage. Most of this time has been committed to benchmarking.
Some of these results have been published, and there has been some discussion of what it all means. Here I’d like to provide my own view of where I think we are, and what these results show.
Nextbigfuture observation
Dwave now has a 1024 qubit system and they have a deal with Cypress semiconductors where they can fabricate a new chip design about once every month. They should be be able to design in enhanced coupling very quickly. Dwave could have a more highly coupled 1024 qubit system within months and a highly coupled and otherwise improved 2048 qubit designs.
DWave is learning how to make their chips perform better. IF error correction is needed to reach faster speeds they can work those modications into their designs as well.
Back to Geordie Rose and his observations
Interesting finding #1: Dwave V6 is the first superconducting processor competitive with state of the art semiconducting processors.
The results that were recently published in the Ronnow et. al. paper show that V6 is competitive with what’s arguably the most highly optimized semiconductor based solution possible today, even on a problem type that in hindsight was a bad choice. A fact that has not gotten as much coverage as it probably should is that V6 beats this competitor both in wallclock time and scaling for certain problem types. That is a truly astonishing achievement. Mattias Troyer and his team achieved an incredible level of optimization with his simulated annealing code, achieving 200 spin updates per nanosecond using a GPU based approach. The ‘out of the box’ unoptimized V6 system beats this approach for some problem types, and even for problem types where it doesn’t do so well (like the ones described in the Ronnow paper) it holds its own, and even wins in some cases.
This is a remarkable historic achievement. It’s the first delivery on the promise of superconducting processors.
Regular semiconductors have had $1 trillion in research and superconducting chips have had about $4 billion.
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Around May 15th of 2013 Google acquired a system built around a 509-qubit Vesuvius 6 (V6) chip. Since it went online, they have been running it 24/7 at 100% usage. Most of this time has been committed to benchmarking.
Some of these results have been published, and there has been some discussion of what it all means. Here I’d like to provide my own view of where I think we are, and what these results show.
Nextbigfuture observation
Dwave now has a 1024 qubit system and they have a deal with Cypress semiconductors where they can fabricate a new chip design about once every month. They should be be able to design in enhanced coupling very quickly. Dwave could have a more highly coupled 1024 qubit system within months and a highly coupled and otherwise improved 2048 qubit designs.
DWave is learning how to make their chips perform better. IF error correction is needed to reach faster speeds they can work those modications into their designs as well.
Back to Geordie Rose and his observations
Interesting finding #1: Dwave V6 is the first superconducting processor competitive with state of the art semiconducting processors.
The results that were recently published in the Ronnow et. al. paper show that V6 is competitive with what’s arguably the most highly optimized semiconductor based solution possible today, even on a problem type that in hindsight was a bad choice. A fact that has not gotten as much coverage as it probably should is that V6 beats this competitor both in wallclock time and scaling for certain problem types. That is a truly astonishing achievement. Mattias Troyer and his team achieved an incredible level of optimization with his simulated annealing code, achieving 200 spin updates per nanosecond using a GPU based approach. The ‘out of the box’ unoptimized V6 system beats this approach for some problem types, and even for problem types where it doesn’t do so well (like the ones described in the Ronnow paper) it holds its own, and even wins in some cases.
This is a remarkable historic achievement. It’s the first delivery on the promise of superconducting processors.
Regular semiconductors have had $1 trillion in research and superconducting chips have had about $4 billion.
Read more »
