Inside the sub-zero lair of the world's most powerful computer
58 minutes ago Share Save Faisal Islam Economics editor Share Save
Inside the secretive lab which stores the world's most powerful computer
It looks like a golden chandelier and contains the coldest place in the universe. What I am looking at is not just the most powerful computer in the world, but technology pivotal to financial security, Bitcoin, government secrets, the world economy and more. Quantum computing holds the key to which companies and countries win - and lose - the rest of the 21st Century. In front of me suspended a metre in the air, in a Google facility in Santa Barbara California, is Willow. Frankly, it was not what I expected.
There are no screens or keyboards, let alone holographic head cams or brain-reading chips. Willow is an oil barrel-sized series of round discs connected by hundreds of black control wires descending into a bronze liquid helium bath refrigerator keeping the Quantum microchip a thousandth of a degree above absolute zero. It looks, and feels, very eighties, but if quantum's potential is realised, the metal and wire jellyfish structure in front of me will transform the world, in many ways. "Welcome to our Quantum AI lab," says Hartmut Neven, Google's Quantum chief, as we go through the high security door. Neven is something of a legendary figure, part technological genius, part techno music enthusiast, who dresses like he has snowboarded here straight from the Burning Man music festival – for which he designs art. Perhaps he has, in a parallel universe - more on that later. His mission is to turn theoretical physics into functional quantum computers "to solve otherwise unsolvable problems" and he admits he's biased but says these chandeliers are the best performing in the world.
Faisal Islam was shown around a Google facility in Santa Barbara.
Secret temple of high science
Much of our conversation is about what we are not allowed to film in this restricted lab. This critical technology is subject to export controls, secrecy and is at the heart of a race for commercial and economic supremacy. Any small advantage, from the shape of new components to the companies in global supply chains, is a source of potential leverage. There is a notable Californian vibe in this temple of high science, in its art and colour. Each quantum computer is given a name such as Yakushima or Mendocino, they are each wrapped in a piece of contemporary art, and various graffiti style murals adorn the walls illuminated by the bright winter sun. Neven holds up Willow, Google's latest Quantum chip, which has delivered two important milestones. He said it settled "once and for all" the discussion about whether quantum computers can do tasks that classical computers can't. Willow also solved a benchmark problem in minutes that would have taken the best computer in the world 10 septillion years, so more than a trillion trillion, or one with 25 zeros on the end, more than the age of the universe. This theoretical result was recently applied to the Quantum Echoes algorithm, impossible for conventional computers, which helps learn the structure of molecules from the same technology used in MRI machines.
Neven reels off the ways he believes this Willow quantum chip will be used "to help with many problems that humankind has now". "It will enable us to discover medicines more efficiently," he says. "It will help us make food production more efficient, it will help us produce energy, to transport energy, to store energy..solve climate change and human hunger..." "It allows us to understand nature much better, and then unlock its secret to build technologies that make life more pleasant for all of us," he tells me. Some researchers believe that actual Artificial Intelligence will only be truly possible with Quantum. Members of the team here have just received the Nobel prize for the original research into "superconducting qubits" used here. The Willow chip has 105 qubits. Microsoft's quantum effort has 8 qubits, but uses a different approach. The race around the world is to get to 1 million qubits for a "utility scale machine" that can do quantum chemistry, drug design, without error. The technology is fragile.
Companies around the world are racing to make a revolutionary new generation of computers.
... continue reading