Re:The quantum computing era is coming fast
by InvisibleCities on Monday December 14, 2015 @11:51AM
(#10732130)
One more thing that you didn't mention, which I think is important: if you run simulated annealing on specialized hardware and compare it to the performance of D-Wave's machine, there is virtually no speedup for D-Wave's machine.
Re:The quantum computing era is coming fast
by nickpsecurity on Monday December 14, 2015 @05:35PM
(#10734532)
Sort. A counterpoint I read on this topic indicated it might be rigged a bit. The comparison was to an emulation of D-Wave's own annealing process on a single-CPU machine. That's... already an unfair representation of simulated annealing's performance on classical hardware. I'd compare the solution of a problem to optimized algorithms on NUMA machines, GPU clusters, and FPGA clusters that cost whatever D-Wave costs. Given that's all one knows about how it really works past their claims: input X dollars to get Y performance and Z energy-use. ;)
Note: One could also compare to performance of single machine with CPU's, GPU's, FPGA's, and/or ASIC's to be more fair. Just needs to be optimal, classical implementation on HW designed for it vs optimal use of D-Wave.
In principal, even if the hardware only supports one algorithm, this could tell us something about whether quantum computers are really better than normal computers. Unfortunately the D-Wave machine/algorithm is still not much better than simply simulating a quantum machine in normal hardware (Quantum Monte Carlo) and worse than the conventional algorithm by Alex Selby.
It's interesting, but it still doesn't shed much light on the important questions.