2012: A Quantum Odyssey How USC Became Home to the World’s First Operational Quantum Computing Center at a University and Why It Matters by Adam Smith, photograph by Adam Voorhes At noon, on December 23, 2011, the USC Viterbi School of Engineering awakened its first volcano. Odd thing is, despite its location in Marina Del Rey, this particular “volcano” was situated in one of the coldest places on earth — 100 times colder than intergalactic space. The crown jewel of the USC Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center, the 128 qubit Rainier chip — christened after the massive strato-volcano outside Seattle — became operational two days before Christmas last year. There was no fanfare of trumpets. No banks of coruscating neon lights. Somewhere in the USC Information Sciences Institute (ISI), inside a 12-foot black box, a tiny quantum processor began to stir. The culmination of 12 years of work by Canadian-based D-WAVE, Rainier had found its first customer in Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor. Lockheed Martin, in turn, had found a home for the cold, black box at ISI, the university’s storied research institute. In the years to come, the USC Lockheed Martin center may prove to be the testbed for a whole new generation of quantum engineers. It may begin to solve the sort of optimization problem that outstrip classical computers. Indeed, Rainier’s successor — the 512 qubit Vesuvius chip — has the potential to solve problems in 120 milliseconds that would take the world’s most powerful supercomputers 320,000 years. For now, December 23, 2011, may be remembered as the day a payroll tax cut was passed by Congress. Or the first Friday of the Mayan doomsday calendar. Or something else entirely. The Conversation Ned Allen, Lockheed Martin’s chief scientist, had a problem. All sophisticated hardware, from the Chevy Volt to the MAC OS, has lots of code. But when an operating system fails, it’s a minor annoyance. When a multi-billion dollar F-35 Joint Strike Fighter has software bugs, it’s mission critical. In January of 2010, Allen requested a meeting with Daniel Lidar, professor of electrical engineering and director of the USC Center for Quantum Information Science & Technology. Lidar thought it was a meeting about potential funding from Lockheed Martin; the talk quickly 32 Fall 2012
turned to jet fighters. As Lidar noted, “Microsoft can release a version of Windows whenever they want, and the worst thing that can happen is customers will complain that the operating system is crashing. But when you talk about an airplane, it won’t even get off the ground until you have convinced the people in charge the software runs correctly.” As Allen explained, that means a process called V&V — verification and validation — whereby Lockheed engineers essentially test to exhaustion, either of funds or the engineers themselves. Lockheed Martin’s F-35 jet fighter has
TO BOLDLY GO . . . The next quantum chip, D-WAVE’s 512 qubit Vesuvius chip, promises to address problems with more variables than all the atoms in the universe.
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