Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing centers

https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/508305-trump-administration-establishes-75-million-quantum-computing-centers

by jonbaer • 6 years ago

237 77 6 years ago

This appears to be a surprisingly level-headed government initiative. The amount is enough to do something but not so much as to be a colossal boondoggle. It's the sort of fundamental research which private industry tends to under-produce because it's hard for any given company to recoup the full value of the R&D, but the target area is something with potential downstream practical implications.

bipartisan

Also by coincidence (?) the first time I've seen that word used recently in a context that wasn't preceded by the words lack of or similar.

adventured2• 6 years ago

I agree. It'd be concerning if they launched with some obscene $1 billion type financial tag with it.

If or when it makes sense, they can always increase funding for these three centers and or to build additional centers. Which is exactly what I'd expect in the coming years.

elliotec• 6 years ago

I dunno. This seems worthy of a lot more funding than a dog walking app that raised $361 million https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/wag

godelski• 6 years ago

I disagree. I'd be completely find with a $1bn financial tag with it. That's not going to be $1bn for a year but spread over something like 5-10 years. If this is a strategic technology, it is highly beneficial for the government to invest in it. They'll make the money back once the technology becomes widespread.

And I mean, look at the last paragraph

... the NSF that would be given $100 billion over five years to invest in American research and technology issues, including quantum computing.

Which seems low when you consider that we spent $430 bn on the F35 and lifetime expected cost is 1.5tn for more acquisition and maintenance. Governments work with larger amounts of money and when you look at science (arguably the best way to get ahead in military) it is pennies (CERN was funded internationally and only cost around $20bn over 10 years and $1bn/yr for operation). I mean the largest super computers cost only a couple hundred million, which means if Google or Facebook wanted to, they could compete.

rubber_duck• 6 years ago

It's the sort of fundamental research which private industry tends to under-produce because it's hard for any given company to recoup the full value of the R&D, but the target area is something with potential downstream practical implications.

Quantum computing ? I've seen just a few months ago some article about a single start-up raising >200M ?

AnthonyMouse2• 6 years ago

There is a difference between doing fundamental research and bringing a product to market.

We know enough about quantum computers to be able to build some of them in limited ways which are commercially useful in very specific domains, so then companies can get investment to do that.

But we still don't really understand all of the fundamentals, and it's always hard to raise investment for fundamental research.

Suppose you could prove that building a quantum computer that can run Shor's Algorithm on interestingly large numbers is impossible. Knowing that would be of immense value. People could stop wasting time trying to create it or defend against it. But how would anybody commercialize that information? Who has the incentive to fund that research?

mlindner• 6 years ago

The US government throws billions of dollars at things on the norm. This could easily grow in the future.

kitteh• 6 years ago

Advisors make these recommendations. Say the right words about the US falling behind China or national security risk and no one wants to be the person on record who said no to this.

krapp2• 6 years ago

Say the right words about the US falling behind China or national security risk and no one wants to be the person on record who said no to this.

Or just say Obama wouldn't have the guts to do it[0].

[0]https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/trump-launched-yem...

loudtieblahblah• 6 years ago

preceded by the words lack of or similar.

Eh, bipartisan stuff still happens. Look at the military industrial complex. Expanding executive power, expanding the surveillance state. Pro wall street regulation repeal.

Usually its to screw us

YinglingLight• 6 years ago

One does not simply get into $26T in debt without a whole lot of agreement from both sides of the aisle. To view any side as pure is to be a pawn in the overton window.

rescripting• 6 years ago

Viewed through that lens perhaps this initiative is to help push quantum computing to a place where it can break modern encryption.

hajile• 6 years ago

While the media paints a different picture, bills sanctioning and restricting China have also been getting through which also means bi-partisan support despite the election rhetoric.

ilrwbwrkhv• 6 years ago

Wonder if Peter Thiel had a hand in it.

SheinhardtWigCo2• 6 years ago

Surely this amount pales in comparison to the likely level of investment in this field by the intelligence community, considering the implications for cryptography. This is like announcing $75m for nuclear technology research during the Manhattan Project.

dogma1138• 6 years ago

This is about setting curriculums at universities and student grants.

SheinhardtWigCo2• 6 years ago

Yes, and who do you think is most likely to hire those students after they’ve gained expertise in the field?

ahelwer4• 6 years ago

NIST is already well into a post-quantum crypto competition. Any serious user of cryptography will have switched to the new protocols by the time quantum computers become powerful enough to crack production RSA. Cloudflare has already prototyped protocols in TLS [0]. Scott Aaronson has gone on record saying he would be "astonished" if this happened within a decade.

This isn't like the cold war days. The quantum computing research community is close-knit and people would notice researchers being hoovered up by the NSA; this hasn't happened.

Shor's algorithm is undeniably a groundbreaking result but is not the killer app of quantum computers. It's more of an unfortunate side-effect.

[0] https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-tls-post-quantum-experiment/

amelius• 6 years ago

Any serious user of cryptography will have switched to the new protocols by the time quantum computers become powerful enough to crack production RSA

Yes, but the NSA could still decrypt messages from the past if they recorded and stored them.

mhxion• 6 years ago

This initiative is launched quicker than I expected, considering the pressure on federal budget due to the pandemic. It's part of National Quantum Initiative Act, signed into law in December, 2018. https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/6227

zenhack2• 6 years ago

$75M is rounding error compared to anything being discussed in the vicinity of the pandemic; I wouldn't really expect it to enter into the conversation.

throwaway72220• 6 years ago

It is a start, right?

koheripbal2• 6 years ago

Every line item in the budget is a rounding error until you add them all up.

trissylegs• 6 years ago

I think Australia has invested at least that over the past 12 years. Last year UNSW's Quantum Computer lab got a $25 million grant extension.

koheripbal2• 6 years ago

This isn't the US's only quantum computing project or gov't funding.

biolurker1• 6 years ago

Why does the title have to be political ans not "The US gov..."? Sounds like there is an agenda

pbourke• 6 years ago

"The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced Tuesday the establishment of three quantum computing centers across the nation, involving an investment of $75 million."

It was a White House initiative, so the headline seems to be accurate.

jcfields• 6 years ago

If the administration deserves the blame when it does something bad, it deserves the credit when it does something good.

anigbrowl• 6 years ago

The Hill is focused primarily on Washington politics so 75% of the stories are about the Administration/House/Senate/Supreme Court/Agency putting out a press release or taking some procedural step.

insensible• 6 years ago

Turn on any NPR News broadcast over at least the past two decades and the first story will invariably start "The ______ administration…", regardless of who's in office.

krapp2• 6 years ago

It's common to refer to an administration by the name of the current President than "the US government," particularly within the US where the Hill is based. You can find numerous references for example to the "Obama Administration, Clinton Adminstration, Bush Administration, etc" in the media.

There's no "agenda" at work here, you're just being needlessly paranoid.

macspoofing• 6 years ago

It is a neutral headline. I don't sense any agenda one way or the other.

notahacker• 6 years ago

Meta: whilst the title itself is a standard, neutral way for a political news site like TheHill to report a government's decisions, this is one case where editing the title for HN submission might help focus the discussion on the quantum computing initiative rather than the Trump administration. I say that as someone who's considerably more enthusiastic than the average HNer about content on here which is inherently political in nature

dr_dshiv2• 6 years ago

Someone needs to invest in developing improved mental models for quantum computers. Much of the development of classical computing (particular from a user perspective) was driven by metaphors: memory, stacks, pipes, files, folders, etc.

What are useful metaphors in the application or use of quantum computers?

ahelwer4• 6 years ago

Quantum computers are modeled with extremely basic linear algebra. Quantum states are vectors and gates are matrices which multiply those vectors to get new vectors. How much simpler do you want? You can explain most of it as rotations around the unit circle which we all learn in high school or earlier.

The problem is pop science crap that tries to explain superposition and entanglement with complete word salad instead of "linear combination" and "product vector cannot be factored into tensor product of single-qbit states", respectively.

Anyway it is extremely doubtful that more programmers will need to learn how to program a quantum computer than, say, will need to learn how to program a GPU. They're both useful co-processors for very specific workloads. Programming will remain a fundamentally classical endeavor.

tlackemann• 6 years ago

This was a great explanation, thanks for the breakdown

dr_dshiv2• 6 years ago

I'm not necessarily asking for better metaphors of quantum phenomena. But the opportunities or affordances of quantum computers is extremely unclear, even to experts. It's like explaining the physics of a transistor to someone and waiting for them to come up with an app design.

Taking the analogy of a GPU, how would you describe what a quantum coprocessor could do for a specialist (in, say, neuroscience or material science)? What kind of datasets would be appropriate? How should they think about what can be done with quantum processing? That's where I think there is room for metaphor development.

helsinki• 6 years ago

This is sublime. If you’re reading this, Trump, please do more of this.

bezmenov• 6 years ago

For those curious about Quantum computing, an excellent starting point: https://quantum.country/qcvc

JimRyan• 6 years ago

"We're making supercomputers, the best computers!" In all seriousness this is great news.

snidane• 6 years ago

Hmm, I thought quantum computing is not happening. See

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2019/01/15/quantum-comput...

Can somebody dispute this claim?

_80911495294• 6 years ago

It's tempting to dismiss that write-up due to its incendiary style, but I find that many of its "factory floor" level insights ring true to me.

As an experimentalist, I would agree with the sentiment that the potential future applications of Quantum computing probably receive too much media attention, given the maturity level of existing technology.

The technical arguments as to why building a useful QC will be impossible are a bit more shaky.

First, the post seems to imply that the calibration effort scales with the number of gates in the algorithm. This is false. In reality, the number of interactions that need individual calibration is basically the number of qubit-qubit pairs exposed by the gate library. The most mainstream approach to error-corrected QC only uses nearest-neighbor interactions, and hence the scaling is linear.

Second, it is not clear to me why the number of computational basis states (2^N) is relevant to the engineering at all. Following this line of thinking, the recent Quantum supremacy result by Google already amounted to a mastery of 2^53 ~ 10^16 degrees of freedom.

Third, an argument is made that large-scale error correction will not work because of correlated errors, of unspecified nature. I think a claim like this should come with a mention of at least one concrete source of such errors, so that we could estimate its magnitude and potential severity. Note that such calculations are almost the essence of day-to-day work of a physicist.

In the absence of more detail, I can make a generic counterargument: Any phenomenon causing such correlated errors by definition affects multiple physical qubits at once, and will tend to be more macroscopic in nature. This is in contrast with the processes that limit the fidelity of one- and two-qubit operations, which is what the error-correcting code will take care of. Macroscopic disturbances are exactly the ones that we can attempt to shield against with clever engineering.

dandanua2• 6 years ago

John Martinis emphasized in his talks that they didn't observe any correlations between local errors in the Sycamore and the total error can be computed through the "high school probability theory" from the local errors. This pretty much silences deniers who used this totally made-up argument against quantum computing.

upofadown• 6 years ago

...along with helping to develop curriculum for students in the quantum computing field to help expand the workforce in this area.

How do you develop a curriculum for something that has not been invented yet and might not even be possible to expand to a useful level? How can you have a workforce?

Sounds like someone was just cutting and pasting from a general policy...

non-entity2• 6 years ago

Doesnt "the workforce" in quantum computing consist of physics PhDs anyways.

oldsklgdfth2• 6 years ago

I can't tell if this number is large or small.

However, all research institutions take a cut of grant money in what is usually called "Facilities and Administration" cost. My undergrad rate was 50% of the proposed sum. Obviously the exact rate varies, but the fee remains.

Ex. If a professor is writes a proposal for 1M. When the funding agency awards it they tack on another 1M for the institution.

This is why "expensive" research is favored in universities, over theoretical work. A big part of tenure review is how much money you have brought in in funding, because that's a direct measure of how much money you made the institution.

So 75M is more like 30M-40M of directly funded research, with the rest going to the institutions.

EDIT: Berkeley's F&A goes at high as 60%. https://spo.berkeley.edu/policy/fa.html#rates

zucker42• 6 years ago

That seems like a perverse incentive.

oldsklgdfth2• 6 years ago

Agreed. This is what you get when you measure performance in terms of profits.

To quote Major General Smedley Butler: "A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes."

Higher education is a rachet.

Students pay ever-higher tuition, which at some level is backstopped by the government. If you don't go to college and pursue prestigious degrees the job market will be inaccessible, beyond basic skill entry level.

Graduate students are exploited laborers for the promise of a PhD and a letter of recommendation for a postdoc. Drawing from a global pool of talent for cheap research labor. If you don't do everything your advisor says you will lose your visa, or not get a publication and your academic career is dead-on-arrival.

Professors are in an environment that encourages pursuing expensive application-based research and high impact publications to pad their resumes for tenure. If you don't rake in the money and publish in "prestigious" journal (usually the walled off ones) you will not be considered for tenure, a raise, etc.

Tax dollars fund research institutions that take their generous "administration" fees and then hand over findings to walled garden journals. If you don't fund research we will not make the breakthroughs that gave us out "comfortable" way of life.

In the US, student athletes (until recently) could not profit off their likeness and all the money went to the school.

At the end of the day, the team of MBAs and administrators make fat salaries. This wouldn't be so bad if institutions used the revenue to improve education and dissemination of knowledge. Instead, they build fancy stadiums and raise tuition.

improbable22• 6 years ago

I think these overhead numbers are quoted as the percentage on top of what gets spent, rather than the percentage of the incoming cash. 50% overhead means that buying a 1M machine involves giving 500K to the institution.

(Still crazy high, of course!)

rflrob• 6 years ago

To zeroth order, it works out to roughly 30 small research groups for 5 years.

At a place like Berkeley, where I did my PhD (but not in anything quantum related), a PhD student and a postdoc both cost a professor something like $75k/year in salary and benefits (money not spent on postdoc salary basically goes to student tuition). Add in the professors salary as well (which is often substantially supported by grants), figure $150k/year for the prof. So in people costs alone, let’s say 1 professor and 2 trainees, that’s about $300k/year, or $1.5M/5 years. Multiply by 30 professors supported, and you’re at $45M, which is 60% of the $75M. And yeah, this is assuming that experiments are free.

Now is 20-30 professors a lot? If sufficiently narrow and esteemed, absolutely. There were 29 people at the 1927 Solvay Conference. Give them an extra couple months where they aren’t sweating a grant, and that’s a lot of time to think.

nomad5432• 6 years ago

Nobel Laureate Robert Laughlin Dismisses Quantum Computing> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYQSbV_BlI8

dandanua2• 6 years ago

Haters gonna hate. John Martinis at Google did a very good job for silencing those deniers.

nomad5432• 6 years ago

So anyone who questions quantum computing is a hater? Your argument reminds me of one interview where Elizabeth Holmes said everyone was a hater for doubting her. John Martinis didn't silence anyone, after decades, still there's no verifiable proof of quantum computing.

IAmEveryone• 6 years ago

...and by not letting anyone not descending in a straight line from the Mayflower work at it, they make sure it's second-rate, at best.

Of course if he also succeeds in abolishing universities' non-profit status as he's recently started adding to his culture war talking point reservoir, not even Americans will be there to run this thing.

Apofis• 6 years ago

I'm really happy to hear this, but this problem is expensive and that better be a B next time.

onetimemanytime• 6 years ago

Since we're throwing trillions around these days (needed, absolutely,) I'd quietly sneak a few billion is vital things that are harder to fund in normal times.

OK, here are $x Billion, make us #1 in this field.

_80911495294• 6 years ago

Title of the post is misleading: The newly-funded centers will address three different topics in the field of Quantum Information Science (QIS).

Quantum computing (the integer-factoring kind) is the focus of only the UC Berkeley-led consortium. This effort accounts for 1/3 of the announced funding.

The other two centers will work on Quantum networking (UIUC) and Quantum sensing (U Colorado).

Original NSF announcement:

https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/announcements/07212...

non-entity2• 6 years ago

Quantum networking

Any recommended reading materials on this?

Balgair• 6 years ago

The CU site is likely tied quantum gyros and axial sensors. Think super precise positional sensors.

Quantum technology is more than just computers.

Anyone know of any good quantum tech based companies in Boulder?

RocketSyntax• 6 years ago

Hmm. No MIT.

Trump administration establishes $75M quantum computing centers

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