Emerging Systems

part 1: Quantum Computing

Lecturer: Mihai Udrescu
 About me
• Computer Architecture and Design
– Arithmetic devices
– Cache memory design
– Hardware description languages (HDL) and FPGA
design
– Evolvable hardware
– Crypto-chip design for testability
– Reliability assessment
• Physics of computation
– Quantum computers and quantum circuit design
– Quantum algorithms
– Quantum computer simulation
– Genetic algorithms in QC 2
 About me
• Review activity
– IEEE Transactions on Computers
– IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of
Integrated Circuits and Systems
– IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation
– ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems
– Microelectronics Journal
• Conference committees
– ACM/IEEE International Conference on
Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis
(CODES+ISSS)
– IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation
– IEEE International Conference on Computer and
Information Technology
– IEEE International Symposium on Design & Diagnostics of
Electronic Circuits & Systems
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 About me
• Invited researcher
– Electrical and Computer Engineering Department –
Carnegie Mellon University (2011)
• Research grants
– ACM – Association for Computing Machinery
– ERS – European Respiratory Society
– Linde
– CNCSIS
• Achievements, honors
– Magna cum laude, PhD Thesis @UPT (2005)
– ACM PhD Forum @ Design Automation Conference
(2005)
– Best paper award, @2nd European Network Intelligence
Conference – ENIC (2015)
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IBM Q
IBM Q
IBM Q
 Quantum Computing?
• Computation with coherent atomic-scale
dynamics
• The circuits become smaller and smaller
– Moore’s law
– ~2020 we will have 1 atom for 1 bit of information
• How low can we go?
– Sub-atom levels means that the classical physics
laws will not apply
– At this level, only the laws of quantum mechanics are
valid
 Why Quantum Computing?
• Because the higher and higher integration
scale will eventually lead to quantum
computational devices

• Because the quantum algorithms are

better than their classical counterparts
– It is a proven fact
– Shor, Grover algorithms
– The algorithmic complexity classes are
different in QC
 The Power of QC
• In quantum systems possibilities count,
even if they never happen!

• Each of the exponentially many

possibilities can be used to perform a
part of that computation
– At the same time!
Nobody understands quantum mechanics
• “Anybody who is not shocked by quantum
mechanics hasn’t understood it.” – Niels Bohr
• “No, you’re not going to be able to
understand it. … You see, my physics
students don’t understand it either. That is
because I don’t understand it. Nobody does.
… The theory of quantum electrodynamics
describes Nature as absurd from the point of
view of common sense. And it agrees fully
with the experiment. So I hope you can
accept Nature as She is – absurd.” – Richard
Feynman
 Absurd but taken seriously (QM as
well as QC)
• Research active at the top world universities:
CalTech, MIT, Stanford, Los Alamos, UCLA,
Oxford, IBM Research, …
• In the mass media: New York Times, The
Economist, American Scientist, Scientific
American, Boston Globe, …
• Industry: D-Wave Systems, IdQuantique
 Beam Splitter
A

light B

• Photons leaving the light source

– Half arrive at detector A;
– Half arrive at detector B.
 Interferometer A

light

• Equal path lengths, rigid mirrors

• Only 1 photon in the apparatus at a time
• All of the photons leaving the light source
arrive at detector B. WHY?
 Possibilities count – computing
interference
• “You will have to brace yourselves for this – not
because is difficult to understand, but because it is
absolutely ridiculous: All we do is draw little arrows
on a piece of paper – that’s all!” – Richard
Feynman
• Arrows for each possibility
• Arrows rotate; speed depends on frequency
• Arrows flip 180o at mirrors, rotate 90o counter-
clockwise when reflected from beam splitters
• Add arrows and square the length of the result to
determine the probability for any possibility
Adding arrows

+ =
Double slit interference
A B Sum
 Interfere in the interferometer
A + =

+ =
B

light
 Possibilities count
• There is an “amplitude” for each possible
path that a photon can take
• The amplitudes can interfere
constructively and destructively, even
though each photon takes only one path
• The amplitudes at detector A interfere
destructively; those at detector B interfere
constructively
 A photon-triggered bomb

light Bang !

• A mirror is mounted on a plunger on the

bomb’s nose
• A single photon hitting the mirror depresses
the plunger and explodes the bomb
 A photon-triggered bomb

light ?

• Some plunger are stuck, producing

duds
• How can you find a good, unexploded
bomb?
 Elitzur-Vaidman bomb test
Some photons are detected here A
Even if the bomb is not destroyed

light

• Possibilities count!
• Experimentally verified
• Can be enhanced to reduce or eliminate
bomb loss
 Two important speedups
• Grover’s quantum database search algorithm
finds an item in an unsorted list of n items in time
O( n )
– Classical algorithms require O(n)

• Shor’s quantum algorithm finds the prime factors

of an n-digit number in time O(n3)
– The best known classical factoring algorithms
require at least time
O 2 n1/ 3 log( n )2 / 3

 Exponential speedup impact
• Factor a 5000 digit number

– On a classical computer (1ns/instruction)

• The classical algorithm will require more than 5
trillion years
• The universe is ~10-16 billion years old

– On a quantum computer (1ns/instruction)

• Shor’s algorithm will require over 2 minutes
Exponential speedup impact
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3 10

4
2 10
Poly ( x)

Exp( x)
4
1 10

0
0 5 10 15 20
x

Exponential vs. polynomial discrepancy