Quantum Computer: The Infinity Machine

"It promises to solve some of humanity's most complex problems. It's back by Jeff Bezos, NSA and The CIA. Each one costs $10, 000, 000.00 and operates at 459° below zero. And nobody knows how it actually works." - THE TIME MAGAZINE

 

The D-Wave Two is an unusual computer, and D-Wave is an unusual company. It's small, just 114 people, and its location puts it well outside the swim of Silicon Valley. But its investors include the storied Menlo Park, Calif., venture-capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which funded Skype and Tesla Motors. It's also backed by famously prescient Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and an outfit called In-Q-Tel, better known as the high-tech investment arm of the CIA. Likewise, D-Wave has very few customers, but they're blue-chip: they include the defense contractor Lockheed Martin; a computing lab that's hosted by NASA and largely funded by Google; and a U.S. intelligence agency that D-Wave executives decline to name.

The supercooled niobium chip at the heart of the D-Wave Two has 512 qubits and therefore could in theory perform 2512 operations simultaneously. That's more calculations than there are atoms in the universe, by many orders of magnitude.

For years astronomers have believed that the coldest place in the universe is a massive gas cloud 5,000 light-years from Earth called the Boomerang Nebula, where the temperature hovers at around -458°F, just a whisker above absolute zero. But as it turns out, the scientists have been off by about 5,000 light-years. The coldest place in the universe is actually in a small city directly east of Vancouver called Burnaby.

Burnaby is the headquarters of a computer firm called D-Wave. Its flagship product, the D-Wave Two, of which there are five in existence, is a black box 10 ft. high. Inside is a cylindrical cooling apparatus containing a niobium computer chip that's been chilled to around 20 millikelvins, which, in case you're not used to measuring temperature in millikelvins, is about -459.6°F, almost 2° colder than the Boomerang Nebula. By comparison, interstellar space is about 80 times hotter.