Australia to fund $620M quantum computer claimed to be first at 'utility-scale' Australian researchers pioneered the development of solar panels, but the nation now imports them in huge quantities – a situation that's become emblematic of the nation's poor record of turning local innovation into jobs and profits across the supply chain. In more recent times, Australian researchers have done pioneering …
HPCwire had a nice backgrounder article on logical and physical Qubits two weeks ago. It states that "100 logical error-corrected qubits would enter an exciting era where quantum computers far exceed the computational capabilities of classical machines". It seems then that PsiQuantum’s target of a 1 million physical qubits machine could achieve that goal, or more (10,000 logical qubits?).
As for Simon's key question: "what Australia's machine will be used for", PsiQuantum's answer is entirely clear: "help solve today’s impossible problems"! (ah-ah-ah-ah-ah!) HPCwire's backgrounder also suggests "molecular simulations" (maybe drug development then?).
Quantum-physics and quantum-chemistry simulations are the most likely useful application of currently-plausible QCs. (Real general quantum computers, that is, not DWave's adiabatic ones. Those are potentially useful if you happen to need to simulate a spin glass, otherwise probably not so much.)
That, and experimenting with quantum algorithms that don't currently have well-understood formal properties, such as QAOA. And simulating quantum circuits for the next generation of QCs.
As usual, the answer to "are quantum computers useful?" is somewhere between the hype and the cynicism. And the answer to "why aren't we hearing so many breathless reports about them in the media?" is "squirrel!".
Australia has been "on the bandwagon" of quantum computing for a long time. I remember Bob Clarke's group in UNSW in Sydney in the 1990s, and they have the "ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology" (see www.cqc2t.org ) driving and directing research. I think that was set up about 20 years ago.
"a situation that's become emblematic of the nation's poor record of turning local innovation into jobs and profits across the supply chain."
Or, more likely, a situation caused by Australia having decent wages, working conditions and workers' rights compared to China paying low wages for porr working conditions and rights and subsidising costs to destroy industries in the West.
So basically the Tories wet dream for the UK then? Just waiting for them to sever the link to the internet in favour of "Britnet" - woke free patriotic information for red white and blue strivers, with the national anthem on the hour every hour whether you want it played or not. (What's not stated is that the govt will be collecting metrics constantly to build your social credit score)
It's extremely unlikely this particular machine will have enough effective error-corrected qubits to break even RSA, FFDH, or ECC asymmetric keys of currently-recommended size. It's even less likely that it would have enough to break symmetric keys of currently-recommended size. Even if it does, it would be one at a time, in a time-consuming, expensive process, so it would only be used for very special cases.
QC won't be a threat to commodity encryption for a very long time yet, if ever. We either don't quite, or only barely, have QCs that show supremacy (depending on which side you believe in that particular argument). Getting from there to breaking decent-size asymmetric keys in bulk requires a tremendous amount of capability improvement.
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