we are coming to you live from the
coldest place in the known universe well
near it anyway what would you say if I
told you that the headquarters for
d-wave the world leader in commercial
quantum computing systems is a stone's
throw from our warehouse and what would
you say if I told you that they invited
us in for a behind-the-scenes tour
well Linus I'd probably say that's
exactly what I was expecting given the
title and thumbnail of this video stop
wasting my time got it let's go
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cooller masters 25th anniversary edition
cosmos 2 features a unique dual curved
tempered glass side panel check it out
now at the link below so in 2007 d-wave
introduced their first quantum processor
now with only 16 qubits it wasn't
especially powerful but the point wasn't
whether you could or couldn't solve the
same problems with a pencil and a piece
of paper the point was that this
scalable approach would allow them to
ship the world's first commercial
quantum computers the d-wave one in 2011
with 128 qubits followed by 512 1000 and
2000 cubic designs in 2013 2015 and 2017
respectively and adding more qubits is
the key to increasing performance
because the more qubits you add the more
complex the problems that you can tackle
you see quantum computing doesn't work
like classical computing with ones and
zeros where you feed it a question and
then it spits out and answered instead a
quantum processor takes all of the
parameters you feed it and works on
every solution pointing you at one or
two or maybe even more optimal solutions
so they're not perfect for everything I
don't think there's a single person in
this building who expects call of duty
black ops 10 to run on a d-wave Mach 5
quantum gaming rig or anything like that
but for scheduling out of sports teams
games over the course of a season for
tackling problems like logistics climate
change and energy distribution or for
conducting AI research these puppies
right here have the potential to
completely disrupt the existing players
so then let's go have a look at one
shall we now there are only a handful of
customers in the world who have actually
Pony DUP the price of a d-wave system
including high rollers like Lockheed
Martin Los Alamos National Lab Google
and NASA but d-wave themselves have a
handful of their latest generation mm
cue systems running here at their
headquarters that are available through
the cloud just make sure that you don't
turn off any of the ones with a
delightfully low-tech online sign bit
tied to it it might be doing very very
important research so from the outside a
mm cue doesn't look that different from
any other computer cluster with a few
black racks and when you open up door
number one there's not much at first
glance to indicate that there's anything
special about it you'll find a network
switch a UPS for battery backup a normal
server responsible for monitoring some
monitoring devices that wait a minute
seven eight degrees milli Kelvin we're
going to have to get back to that later
there's also a second server that takes
a problem and translates it into machine
code using custom room temperature
electronics to generate high precision
analog signals that it then sends to as
we promised just about the coldest place
in the known universe
the single yes just one chip single code
named Washington quantum processor at
the heart of this machine but where
exactly is it it's not behind door 2 or
door number 3 back there you'll find the
first and second stage pumps that are
used to create a vacuum around the
processor to thermally insulate it and
it's cooling system from the outside
world as well as a compressor for the
aforementioned cooling system and you
also won't find it in this barrel shaped
doodad that is actually a liquid
nitrogen filter that removes impurities
from the coolant mixture of helium 3 and
helium 4 isotopes and is one of the
things that allows the wave systems to
run for years at a time a critical
feature given that the chip kind of
locks into a certain configuration once
it's supercooled and if you heat one of
these puppies up back to room
temperature it can take up to two days
to cool it back down and up to four
weeks to finish the the rebalancing or
recalibration process no no to find the
actual processor we have to go past this
first door on the left here that handles
connecting the all-business racks at the
front to the giant box here that was
hiding in plain sight that I'll be
referring to as the party in the back or
perdy waves gentle suggestion the
shielded enclosure
this right here is effectively a big
Faraday cage and the first of sixteen
layers of shielding that are designed to
shield the powerlines and preserve the
integrity of the signals to and from the
quantum processor to the greatest degree
possible and that was a very intentional
pun by the way now normally these rooms
are closed and there is a series of
casings on top of this apparatus here to
maintain the vacuum around what is
effectively the motherboard of our
quantum computer but they had one open
for maintenance today so we've got to
get up close and personal
the thing is peppered with probes and
sensors heat exchangers data wires but
the five big plates are really the main
attraction here each of them represents
a different stage of the cooling system
the top one gets signals from the
outside world on copper wires and runs
on a frosty 70 degrees Kelvin the next
one down uses the same fridge and these
braided copper conductors to get down to
four degrees Kelvin which is both low
enough
to condense helium to a liquid and to
switch over from copper wires to the
superconductor niobium the middle plate
here uses vacuum helium for to drop our
signal wires to one degree Kelvin the
fourth uses helium-3 to get us to about
it tenth of that and the final stage
uses a sophisticated mixture of those
two isotopes to drive this entire
filtering and shielding apparatus as
well as the processor inside down to its
typical operating temperature of about
Oh point zero one five degrees Kelvin
damn near absolute zero but why does it
need to be so cold niobium already super
conducts at nine degrees Kelvin
interstellar space is 3.1 degrees Kelvin
our solar system is even warmer we're
talking Oh point zero one five degrees
Kelvin well this superconducting chip
here is what's inside there and it's
connected via four hundred
superconducting wires and this is kind
of like the pins on a CPU socket and
what it's doing if it's using quantum
mechanical effect to process information
so for that to work
these effects need to be significant
enough to use them for computation which
means that the temperature needs to be
well below the energy scale all of those
quantum effects if it wasn't then the
data you'd get would be very very noisy
corrupted by heat related quantum
effects that's why the colder they can
get pretty much the better and getting
even colder in the future may actually
be practical so this generation of the
waste processors consumes no power and
output no heat meaning that the 20
kilowatts of power that are required to
run
system is just dedicated to the cooling
system so unless they wanted to go
colder this energy cost doesn't change
whether you're running a hundred cubits
or 2,000 cubits that's just the sweet
spot of practicality and functionality
today
and more cooling is far from the only
thing on the horizon the future's
looking bright for our neighbors here at
d-wave they don't have a 50-year vision
yet necessarily but in the near term
they don't really perceive anyone else
in the space as a real competitor with a
commercializable technology and with
more Rd focus they think their system
could be as compact as three or four
racks and capable of taking on some of
the hardest neural network problems that
we face in the years to come and you
know what sounds pretty good to me
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- that's dollarshaveclub.com / - so
thanks to d-wave for hosting us here
thanks to you guys for watching if you
dislike this video you know where that
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this video than usual but we also have
links down there to our merch store
which has cool shirts like this one and
our community forum which you should
totally join
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