[HN Gopher] How Will Linux Handle Quantum Computing? (2017) [pdf]
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How Will Linux Handle Quantum Computing? (2017) [pdf]
Author : QuietApe
Score : 28 points
Date : 2021-02-18 12:54 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.linuxplumbersconf.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.linuxplumbersconf.org)
| bArray wrote:
| I really suspect that if QC ever gets to the point where it's
| speaking to an OS of some type, then it will become something
| like what a GPU is to a CPU - where some specialized computing is
| offloaded to it. I imagine this because a) classical computing
| will most definitely be required if even just for communicating
| with I/O, b) QC systems are vulnerable to heat and can't be too
| near stuff that could get hot, c) not every type of computation
| benefits from QC.
|
| I imagine we will even call it the QCU, quantum computing unit.
| It'll probably be a highly specialized piece of hardware for
| quite some time too, like what a dedicated random number
| generator piece of hardware would be to a normal computer. It
| would really need to have some killer application in order to end
| up in hardware mere mortals have access to.
|
| What I really think QC will end up with is some specialized
| language, such as what FPGAs have, that tell it how to initialize
| the system and measure it. I imagine Linux would likely be one of
| the first OSes to actually support it, given that Linux is
| heavily used in servers and cloud computing will likely be the
| first places (after research labs) to actually be able to afford
| to own and run the QCU hardware.
|
| So I believe Linux is here to stay, even if it really doesn't
| change so much.
| gaze wrote:
| I was involved with a superconducting qubit setup where we had
| a compiler written in python that converted a DSL to binaries
| that were loaded onto an FPGA, which generated control signals
| and read out results that streamed over pci/e. The system that
| this ran on ran windows but that was basically inconsequential.
| Linux has basically nothing to do with quantum computing other
| than it may be the preferred environment for some researchers
| to work in.
| mikewave wrote:
| At D-Wave, we have a software stack that (no surprise) is
| entirely Linux based to talk to the QPU. After all, we expect
| users of classical computers to formulate and submit problems
| over a classical Internet using classical APIs, and we expect
| to hire classical developers to work on all of the parts of the
| system that aren't frozen down to a hair above absolute zero.
|
| You're not far off on some of your assumptions for how it ends
| up working in reality. We do see it as an accelerator for
| specific operations, specifically for optimization problems;
| however, much as people originally saw GPUs as being for
| gaming, there's a lot of room for creative individuals to
| explore the capabilities of the system and see what other uses
| it can be put to.
|
| We have a cloud IDE now with excellent visualization tools, and
| it's free to get started. You should definitely go check it
| out, considering how interested you sound; it should be very
| educational. Any developer with some basic Python skill can
| learn how to fire off toy problems to it, the hard part where
| you need more of a statistics and hard math background is in
| mapping real-world optimization problems to the Ising model we
| use.
| zbendefy wrote:
| Or more likely it will be called QPU then, that goes better
| along with gpus and cpus
| reikonomusha wrote:
| They are already called QPUs.
| dadarecit wrote:
| This is fascinating, does anyone know where I can educate myself
| on programming quantum computers, as a undergraduate that mostly
| deals with front end?
| dangirsh wrote:
| Note that this is now a reality: architectures very similar to
| slide 60 have been built and made cloud-accessible.
|
| The note about "qubit division multiplexing" has also been built:
| some platforms provide access to a connected component of qubits
| instead of the whole chip. This is helpful for maximizing the
| availability of the hardware, since it's still extremely scarce.
| mikewave wrote:
| At D-Wave, our cloud-accessible QPUs are entirely available to
| one user at a time, in the form of "problems" that are
| submitted to a "solver" stack to load onto the QPU and sample
| in order to get an answer. This ends up being much like having
| a single-threaded CPU and a traditional OS handling
| multitasking; we have a scheduler higher up the stack
| responsible for determining which user problem to run next. The
| result is realtime performance for users while ensuring that
| the QPU sits idle as little as possible.
|
| For the most part, there aren't enough qubits yet even on our
| 5000+ qubit machines that anyone would want to share the QPU
| with someone else during an execution cycle. In fact, this is
| the reason why we have a Hybrid Solver that combines classical
| and quantum technologies - people want to work on much, much
| bigger problems than fit onto the working graph of the QPU.
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