The history of computing hardware spans the developments from early devices used for simple calculations to today's complex computers, encompassing advancements in both analog and digital technology.
Blue Gene was an IBM project aimed at designing supercomputers that can reach operating speeds in the petaFLOPS (PFLOPS) range, with relatively low power consumption.
This is a timeline of quantum computing.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute is a private research university in Troy, New York. It is the oldest technological university in the English-speaking world and the Western Hemisphere. It was established in 1824 by Stephen Van Rensselaer and Amos Eaton for the "application of science to the common purposes of life".
IBM Research is the research and development division for IBM, an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. IBM Research is the largest industrial research organization in the world and has twelve labs on six continents.
Charles Henry Bennett is a physicist, information theorist and IBM Fellow at IBM Research. Bennett's recent work at IBM has concentrated on a re-examination of the physical basis of information, applying quantum physics to the problems surrounding information exchange. He has played a major role in elucidating the interconnections between physics and information, particularly in the realm of quantum computation, but also in cellular automata and reversible computing. He discovered, with Gilles Brassard, the concept of quantum cryptography and is one of the founding fathers of modern quantum information theory.
James Alexander Hendler is an artificial intelligence researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, United States, and one of the originators of the Semantic Web. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration.
New York Blue is an 18 rack Blue Gene/L and a 2 rack Blue Gene/P massively parallel supercomputer based on the IBM system-on-chip technology. It is in the New York Center for Computational Sciences (NYCCS). The supercomputer is owned by Stony Brook University and is located at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, Long Island, New York. The funds for this machine were provided by the New York state, with the leadership of the NYS Assembly. It began operating on July 15, 2007, when it was the fifth most powerful supercomputer dedicated to general research. According to Stony Brook provost Robert McGrath, it would also rank within the top 10 when including supercomputers available solely for military research. The renovation of the laboratory space holding the machine was supported by the State of New York and the U.S. DOE fund. As of June 2010, the Blue Gene/L was ranked 67th in the top 500 supercomputing rankings. Together with the Computational Center for Nanotechnology Innovations at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York Blue provides the New York state with more computing power available for general research than any state in the nation.
The Hartree Centre is a high performance computing, data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) research facility focused on industry-led challenges. It was formed in 2012 at Daresbury Laboratory on the Sci-Tech Daresbury science and innovation campus in Cheshire, UK. The Hartree Centre is part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) which itself is part of United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI).
IBM Quantum Platform is an online platform allowing public and premium access to cloud-based quantum computing services provided by IBM. This includes access to a set of IBM's prototype quantum processors, a set of tutorials on quantum computation, and access to an interactive textbook. As of February 2021, there are over 20 devices on the service, six of which are freely available for the public. This service can be used to run algorithms and experiments, and explore tutorials and simulations around what might be possible with quantum computing.
Cloud-based quantum computing is the invocation of quantum emulators, simulators or processors through the cloud. Increasingly, cloud services are being looked on as the method for providing access to quantum processing. Quantum computers achieve their massive computing power by initiating quantum physics into processing power and when users are allowed access to these quantum-powered computers through the internet it is known as quantum computing within the cloud.
In quantum computing, quantum supremacy or quantum advantage is the goal of demonstrating that a programmable quantum computer can solve a problem that no classical computer can solve in any feasible amount of time, irrespective of the usefulness of the problem. The term was coined by John Preskill in 2012, but the concept dates to Yuri Manin's 1980 and Richard Feynman's 1981 proposals of quantum computing.
In quantum computing, a qubit is a unit of information analogous to a bit in classical computing, but it is affected by quantum mechanical properties such as superposition and entanglement which allow qubits to be in some ways more powerful than classical bits for some tasks. Qubits are used in quantum circuits and quantum algorithms composed of quantum logic gates to solve computational problems, where they are used for input/output and intermediate computations.
Quantum volume is a metric that measures the capabilities and error rates of a quantum computer. It expresses the maximum size of square quantum circuits that can be implemented successfully by the computer. The form of the circuits is independent from the quantum computer architecture, but compiler can transform and optimize it to take advantage of the computer's features. Thus, quantum volumes for different architectures can be compared.
Qiskit is an open-source software development kit (SDK) for working with quantum computers at the level of circuits, pulses, and algorithms. It provides tools for creating and manipulating quantum programs and running them on prototype quantum devices on IBM Quantum Platform or on simulators on a local computer. It follows the circuit model for universal quantum computation, and can be used for any quantum hardware that follows this model.
Sycamore is a transmon superconducting quantum processor created by Google's Artificial Intelligence division. It has 53 qubits.
IBM Think is an annual business conference organized by IBM. Before 2018, IBM held similar business conferences under different names. Think is seen as a successor to World of Watson that was held in 2017. The conference name is a reference the 'Think' slogan used by IBM.
