<html><head><style type='text/css'>p { margin: 0; }</style></head><body><div style='font-family: garamond,new york,times,serif; font-size: 12pt; color: #000000'><div>Is there really such a thing as a 1000-qubit quantum computer that works?</div><div><div>Does D-Wave's computer really exhibit quantum effects?</div></div><div>What problems can you calculate with a D-Wave, and why did Google and NASA buy them?</div><div>Is a D-Wave really any faster than running a commercial software package like CPLEX</div><div>on a cluster of Intel or AMD machines?</div><div><br></div><div>And really, w<span style="font-size: 12pt;">hat's the difference between adiabatic quantum computation</span></div><div><div>and the quantum gate model? </div></div><div><br></div><div>These are all controversial questions (except the last one).</div><div>Tomorrow's colloquium will address<span style="font-size: 12pt;"> them. I think it'll be interesting.</span></div><div><br></div><div>REMINDER: Lunch is served at 12:15; the talk starts promptly at 12:30!</div><div>If you want lunch, come at 12:20 so you can get into the room before the</div><div>talk starts. This applies to ALL lunchtime colloquiua in room 105.</div><div><br></div><div>-- Andrew Appel</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div><br></div>Colloquium Speaker<br>Catherine McGeoch, Amherst College and D-Wave Systems<br>Benchmarking the D-Wave 2X: Challenges and Early Results<br>Tuesday, October 20- 12:30pm<br>Computer Science 105<br><br>Benchmarking the D-Wave 2X: Challenges and Early Results<br><br>A D-Wave platform implements a quantum annealing algorithm in hardware, to solve an NP-hard problem known as Ising Model Optimization (also called Quadratic Unconstrained Boolean Optimization). The ``hardware'' is a processor chip containing qubits that exploit quantum properties such as superposition and entanglement to carry out the computation. This is a heuristic algorithm that belongs to the adiabatic quantum model of computation, an alternative to the more familiar quantum gate model of computation. <br><br>The task of performance assessment for these novel platforms -- comparing classical heuristics implemented in software to a quantum analog heuristic implemented in hardware -- gives rise to a number of new methodological issues, on top of the usual challenges relating to evaluation of heuristics for NP-hard problems. I will discuss some of these issues and present some early performance results for the D-Wave 2X, a 1000-qubit processor launched in summer 2015.<br><br><div id="9fa6274a-1b34-4f45-893b-c0a3fda3060b"><br><span></span><br></div><br><br>_______________________________________________<br>talks mailing list<br>talks@lists.cs.princeton.edu<br>To edit subscription settings or remove yourself, use this link:<br>https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/talks<br></div></body></html>