7 ms·

Quantum Computers sitting in their cryogenic chambers are such works of art, stacks of giant brass plates and hundreds of heat pipes (or coolant pipes? liquid h

Quantum Computers sitting in their cryogenic chambers are such works of art, stacks of giant brass plates and hundreds of heat pipes (or coolant pipes? liquid helium I suppose) twisted and coiling throughout the structure hanging like some steampunk chandelier (why do they hang from above anyway?) EDIT: changed to a few direct links to pics: [0][1][2] The esoteric design reminds me of the Connection Machine blog posted the other day, "to communicate to people that this was the first of a new generation of computers, unlike any machine they had seen before." [3] I'm curious what they do with these prototypes once they are obsoleted in a matter of months, are the parts so expensive they tear it down to reuse them? Or will the machines be able to go on tour and stand in glass cases to intrigue the next generation of engineers? I know it had a tremendous effect on me to stand in front of a hand-wired lisp machine at the MIT museum. [0] https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AANsFUz.img https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AANs... [1] https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AANsBTo.img https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AANs... [2] https://static.reuters.com/resources/r/?m=02&d=20191023&t=2&i=1444205374&r=LYNXMPEF9M1AZ&w=1600 https://static.reuters.com/resources/r/?m=02&d=20191023&t=2&... [3] https://tamikothiel.com/theory/cm_txts/ https://tamikothiel.com/theory/cm_txts/

krastanov 5y ago
The pipes you mentioned are microwave conduits (for various control signals).
- jjoonathan 5y ago
  0.141" semi-rigid coax, diameter of champions.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    > 0.141" semi-rigid coax, diameter of champions. I wonder if we measure it more precisely we'll get to something closer to 1.4142135623730950488...
    - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
      It would be a bit of a surprise since the unit of measure is inches and I'm not sure what inches would have to do with quantum computing. I feel like the inch is essentially a random factor here.
      - rbanffy 5y ago
        I’d make this cable as a form of art.
    - madengr 5y ago
      Close, as the ratio of the inner and outer conductor diameters, to exactly get 50 Ohms, is an irrational number.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  Thanks! Is my assumption of liquid helium running somewhere correct? I figure that's the only way to reach the temperatures required (single digit kelvins, no?)
  - zackbloom 5y ago
    It's much colder than that, single-digit millikelvin. They use He-3/4 dilution refrigerators [1]. Getting things cold and electromagnetically-quiet enough that the quantum state doesn't collapse is a big challenge in the field. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_refrigerator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_refrigerator
    - a9h74j 5y ago
      And some people think the brain can be deterministic at 300K.
      - GoblinSlayer 5y ago
        Why not? Computers are deterministic at higher temperatures.
        a9h74j 5y ago
        Even assuming a computer model, think of an analog computer with long integration times, potentially high gain for thermal noise terms, simulating a chaotic system. Or, look at literature on error rates for people performing simple repetitive tasks.
    - thomasjudge 5y ago
      And if you need colder than 2mk, nuclear demagnetization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_refrigeration#Nuclear_demagnetization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_refrigeration#Nuclear...
  - krastanov 5y ago
    It is even worse than single digit Kelvin. Liquid Nitrogen with pumping: 40 K for a few thousand dollars. Run of the mill Liquid Helium: 4 K for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. But for these devices you need 15mK which is reachable only if you mix two different isotopes of Helium and pump the mixture into vacuum. Such a device is up to 1M$ and more. And the insides of that device are in vacuum (actually, air freezing into ice on top of the chip can be a problem). The brass is basically the heat conductor between the chip and the cold side of your pumped He mixture (which is *not* just sloshing inside the whole body of the cryostat where the chips are). Another reason you do not want the He sloshing around is because you will be opening this to make changes to the device and do not want all the extremely expensive He3 (the special isotope you need for the mixture) to be lost.
annoyingnoob 5y ago
My antivirus client won't let me open that second link, claims some kind of malicious activity, didn't look into the details.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  Strange, it is a personal blog with literally no javascript (just checked my network tab), might be worth investigating what your antivirus has against it. It's a very good read, so just in case your antivirus is friendly with archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20211113093602/https://tamikothiel.com/theory/cm_txts/ https://web.archive.org/web/20211113093602/https://tamikothi...
ruuda 5y ago
They hang from the ceiling because they use evaporative cooling (the high-energy particles escape, and the low-energy particles remain in the bucket), each lower stage a bit cooler than the one above it.
- arghwhat 5y ago
  Also because it looks cool, which is only appropriate for a cooling system.
- a9h74j 5y ago
  AFAIK, another reason to work downward, historically at least, was to lower an assembly into an open-neck dewar.
newsbinator 5y ago
Someday when quantum computers are the size of dust particles and we're surrounded by them there'll be some version of a steampunk subculture that values decorating their homes with these ancient beautiful and laughably incapable devices. Maybe in 30 ~ 50 years or so.
- nixpulvis 5y ago
  I can't help but think of turning them into horrible sounding organs.
- danbolt 5y ago
  I'm very excited to configure DNS blocking for the quantum dust particles trying to serve me advertisements in my home.
  - skhr0680 5y ago
    At least analytics won’t be able to tell if you looked at the ad or not
    - szundi 5y ago
      But they can tell how probable that was
    - adolph 5y ago
      “Why do you look at the speck of quantum dust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the GPU in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a GPU in your own eye?" https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%207:3-5&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%207:3-5...
- beambot 5y ago
  I would gladly decorate my home with one. They're beautiful in their own way.
Iv 5y ago
Unless I am missing something, I believe that these pictures are at 99% the cryogenic system.
rackjack 5y ago
I look forward to the day we can look back at these "quantum chandeliers" with nostalgia, like we look back on those massive, room-sized mainframes today.
- loxias 5y ago
  I can't wait to be in the vintage quantum computing club, where we build working replicas of the "quantum chandeliers" with more modern and stable parts, and tinker with them as functional room decoration. Related, the DEC PDPs certainly look stylish!
dhosek 5y ago
Cray supercomputers were also aesthetically beautiful machines: https://cdn.britannica.com/11/23611-050-81E61C8A/Cray-1-supercomputer-diameter-1976.jpg https://cdn.britannica.com/11/23611-050-81E61C8A/Cray-1-supe... So happy to be able to find a picture of the wirewrap inside: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/e2/d2/47/e2d24789e6fed59290086997ea802cb3.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/e2/d2/47/e2d2...
- eb0la 5y ago
  The computer history museum has a CRAY you can see very close ( https://computerhistory.org/ https://computerhistory.org/ ). Worth the visit.
  - exdsq 5y ago
    You’ve just given me my weekend plans, thank you very much! They have a working IBM 1401 that you can see in action too!
    - hkt 5y ago
      Also a truly astonishingly beautiful babbage engine. I came from the UK to CA to see it.
      - dhosek 5y ago
        You do know that there's one in London at the Science Museum (the one that was¹ in California was built at the same time for Nathan Myhrvold). ⸻⸻⸻ 1. It was on loan to the Computer History Museum from Myhrvold and returned to him in 2016. It's unclear whether he did re-loan it or if he's busily calculating the values of polynomials with it.² The Computer History Museum website makes it sound like it's currently on display but I can find no news stories about it going back to the museum. 2. Just kidding about him calculating polynomials—it's (I think) on display in the lobby of Intellectual Ventures.
        5y ago
wishinghand 5y ago
The TV show DEVS has a computer that looks a lot like those first three links. I always thought their prop was a set designer's imagination run wild, not actually based in what quantum computers look like.
- runlevel1 5y ago
  Some additional information on ³He/⁴He dilution refrigeration that makes up the chandelier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_refrigerator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_refrigerator
jacquesm 5y ago
Amazing images, nothing that would look out of place in the Villa Straylight.
alpineidyll3 5y ago
They hang because they sit at the bottom of dilution refrigerators.
nsxwolf 5y ago
What's that picture of what looks like an exploded CPU package on IBMs site? Is that metaphorical or is that really what the processor looks like? It looks small and not-chandelier like.
dclowd9901 5y ago
Whoa, that is so cool! I thought the Eischer esque machine in Devs was mostly Hollywood fluff but it absolutely looked almost just like that.
- throwaway2568 5y ago
  The Devs producer met with the Google team in Santa Barbara (which works on very similar superconducting qubits), so it should look very close! That said the whole hovering in free space thing was perhaps a bit over the top in the show. https://qz.com/1826093/devs-creator-alex-garland-describes-the-real-silicon-valley/ https://qz.com/1826093/devs-creator-alex-garland-describes-t...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
Are there any pictures of the hand-wired LISP Machine online? I searched, but couldn't find it. Also - when LISP was invented (1958) - what was the state of computers at the time? Doing some research - it seems like direct keyboard input to computers was only available for 2 years prior. It seems like languages were decades ahead of hardware. I guess I'm having trouble fathoming how languages were so far ahead while computers were seemingly VERY primitive. Are there any articles on the process for how LISP was designed and implemented??
- mixedCase 5y ago
  > I guess I'm having trouble fathoming how languages were so far ahead while computers were seemingly VERY primitive. I have a much bigger emotional conflict when contrasting that with the current state of mainstream programming languages, that are only just beginning to tread onto territories like algebraic data types and pattern matching that ML paved almost 50 years ago. Is there any hope for true dependent typing to become popular before 2040?
  - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    Don't Prolog and Erlang have pattern matching built in??
  - orbifold 5y ago
    Lean4 comes pretty close to a general purpose dependently typed programming language.
- jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
  > I guess I'm having trouble fathoming how languages were so far ahead while computers were seemingly VERY primitive. My intuition is that back then getting run time on computers was so scarce that the best programmers and mathematicians spent a great deal of brain time considering exactly what their software should be. If you only get one run a day, if that, you're gonna do your best to make it count. Today we're often in the opposite situation, where it can be entirely rational to burn incredible amounts of computation in the absolute sense to save brain time.
tester756 5y ago
is this most advanced tech at this very moment?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
vilhelm_s 5y ago
One of the IBM scientists seems to have an old quantum computer as a piece of office decoration, so I guess there's some hope to preserve them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWJCfOvochA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWJCfOvochA
speculativename 5y ago
I was lucky enough to tour the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York a few months ago and captured several sound recordings of this[0] room housing a quantum computer. Not only do they look cool, they sound very intense! [1] A stark contrast to the minimalist/austere design of the actual enclosure, or maybe it's fitting, depending on your perspective... [0] https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%253A%252F%252Fs3-ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com%252Fpsh-ex-ftnikkei-3937bb4%252Fimages%252F0%252F6%252F1%252F4%252F36024160-7-eng-GB%252Fphoto.JPG?width=700&fit=cover&gravity=faces&dpr=2&quality=medium&source=nar-cms https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt... [1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CeZjXUH6Y8ZvfcS0IM0MWoLNAYJrmSWp/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CeZjXUH6Y8ZvfcS0IM0MWoLNAYJ...
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  Yep, definitely the sound of an AI actively hijacking my brain D: thanks
gaze 5y ago
So the chandelier looking thing is a dilution fridge and is just used to make the processor cold. The processor is usually pretty small, not that different from your CPU. That part is indeed iterated on but the fridges aren’t changed much. The wiring is sometimes switched out, but the fridges get used forever. I’m using one now that’s maybe 30 years old. The dilution units are very hard to make, and there’s a very small academic family to which everyone who can make one traces back to. They mostly hang like that since most dil units are designed so the coldest part is usually the lowest, and they’re generally orientation sensitive. You want easy access to the bottom part, so you just put the plates in descending order of temperature and you hang the thing from the ceiling.

krastanov 5y ago

The pipes you mentioned are microwave conduits (for various control signals).

jjoonathan 5y ago
0.141" semi-rigid coax, diameter of champions.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  > 0.141" semi-rigid coax, diameter of champions. I wonder if we measure it more precisely we'll get to something closer to 1.4142135623730950488...
  - TaylorAlexander 5y ago
    It would be a bit of a surprise since the unit of measure is inches and I'm not sure what inches would have to do with quantum computing. I feel like the inch is essentially a random factor here.
    - rbanffy 5y ago
      I’d make this cable as a form of art.
  - madengr 5y ago
    Close, as the ratio of the inner and outer conductor diameters, to exactly get 50 Ohms, is an irrational number.
jazzyjackson 5y ago
Thanks! Is my assumption of liquid helium running somewhere correct? I figure that's the only way to reach the temperatures required (single digit kelvins, no?)
- zackbloom 5y ago
  It's much colder than that, single-digit millikelvin. They use He-3/4 dilution refrigerators [1]. Getting things cold and electromagnetically-quiet enough that the quantum state doesn't collapse is a big challenge in the field. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_refrigerator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_refrigerator
  - a9h74j 5y ago
    And some people think the brain can be deterministic at 300K.
    - GoblinSlayer 5y ago
      Why not? Computers are deterministic at higher temperatures.
      - a9h74j 5y ago
        Even assuming a computer model, think of an analog computer with long integration times, potentially high gain for thermal noise terms, simulating a chaotic system. Or, look at literature on error rates for people performing simple repetitive tasks.
  - thomasjudge 5y ago
    And if you need colder than 2mk, nuclear demagnetization: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_refrigeration#Nuclear_demagnetization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_refrigeration#Nuclear...
- krastanov 5y ago
  It is even worse than single digit Kelvin. Liquid Nitrogen with pumping: 40 K for a few thousand dollars. Run of the mill Liquid Helium: 4 K for tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. But for these devices you need 15mK which is reachable only if you mix two different isotopes of Helium and pump the mixture into vacuum. Such a device is up to 1M$ and more. And the insides of that device are in vacuum (actually, air freezing into ice on top of the chip can be a problem). The brass is basically the heat conductor between the chip and the cold side of your pumped He mixture (which is *not* just sloshing inside the whole body of the cryostat where the chips are). Another reason you do not want the He sloshing around is because you will be opening this to make changes to the device and do not want all the extremely expensive He3 (the special isotope you need for the mixture) to be lost.

annoyingnoob 5y ago

My antivirus client won't let me open that second link, claims some kind of malicious activity, didn't look into the details.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
Strange, it is a personal blog with literally no javascript (just checked my network tab), might be worth investigating what your antivirus has against it. It's a very good read, so just in case your antivirus is friendly with archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20211113093602/https://tamikothiel.com/theory/cm_txts/ https://web.archive.org/web/20211113093602/https://tamikothi...

ruuda 5y ago

They hang from the ceiling because they use evaporative cooling (the high-energy particles escape, and the low-energy particles remain in the bucket), each lower stage a bit cooler than the one above it.

arghwhat 5y ago
Also because it looks cool, which is only appropriate for a cooling system.
a9h74j 5y ago
AFAIK, another reason to work downward, historically at least, was to lower an assembly into an open-neck dewar.

newsbinator 5y ago

Someday when quantum computers are the size of dust particles and we're surrounded by them there'll be some version of a steampunk subculture that values decorating their homes with these ancient beautiful and laughably incapable devices. Maybe in 30 ~ 50 years or so.

nixpulvis 5y ago
I can't help but think of turning them into horrible sounding organs.
danbolt 5y ago
I'm very excited to configure DNS blocking for the quantum dust particles trying to serve me advertisements in my home.
- skhr0680 5y ago
  At least analytics won’t be able to tell if you looked at the ad or not
  - szundi 5y ago
    But they can tell how probable that was
  - adolph 5y ago
    “Why do you look at the speck of quantum dust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the GPU in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a GPU in your own eye?" https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%207:3-5&version=NIV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%207:3-5...
beambot 5y ago
I would gladly decorate my home with one. They're beautiful in their own way.

Iv 5y ago

Unless I am missing something, I believe that these pictures are at 99% the cryogenic system.

rackjack 5y ago

I look forward to the day we can look back at these "quantum chandeliers" with nostalgia, like we look back on those massive, room-sized mainframes today.

loxias 5y ago
I can't wait to be in the vintage quantum computing club, where we build working replicas of the "quantum chandeliers" with more modern and stable parts, and tinker with them as functional room decoration. Related, the DEC PDPs certainly look stylish!

dhosek 5y ago

Cray supercomputers were also aesthetically beautiful machines: https://cdn.britannica.com/11/23611-050-81E61C8A/Cray-1-supercomputer-diameter-1976.jpg https://cdn.britannica.com/11/23611-050-81E61C8A/Cray-1-supe... So happy to be able to find a picture of the wirewrap inside: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/e2/d2/47/e2d24789e6fed59290086997ea802cb3.jpg https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/e2/d2/47/e2d2...

eb0la 5y ago
The computer history museum has a CRAY you can see very close ( https://computerhistory.org/ https://computerhistory.org/ ). Worth the visit.
- exdsq 5y ago
  You’ve just given me my weekend plans, thank you very much! They have a working IBM 1401 that you can see in action too!
  - hkt 5y ago
    Also a truly astonishingly beautiful babbage engine. I came from the UK to CA to see it.
    - dhosek 5y ago
      You do know that there's one in London at the Science Museum (the one that was¹ in California was built at the same time for Nathan Myhrvold). ⸻⸻⸻ 1. It was on loan to the Computer History Museum from Myhrvold and returned to him in 2016. It's unclear whether he did re-loan it or if he's busily calculating the values of polynomials with it.² The Computer History Museum website makes it sound like it's currently on display but I can find no news stories about it going back to the museum. 2. Just kidding about him calculating polynomials—it's (I think) on display in the lobby of Intellectual Ventures.
      - 5y ago

wishinghand 5y ago

The TV show DEVS has a computer that looks a lot like those first three links. I always thought their prop was a set designer's imagination run wild, not actually based in what quantum computers look like.

runlevel1 5y ago
Some additional information on ³He/⁴He dilution refrigeration that makes up the chandelier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_refrigerator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilution_refrigerator

jacquesm 5y ago

Amazing images, nothing that would look out of place in the Villa Straylight.

alpineidyll3 5y ago

They hang because they sit at the bottom of dilution refrigerators.

nsxwolf 5y ago

What's that picture of what looks like an exploded CPU package on IBMs site? Is that metaphorical or is that really what the processor looks like? It looks small and not-chandelier like.

dclowd9901 5y ago

Whoa, that is so cool! I thought the Eischer esque machine in Devs was mostly Hollywood fluff but it absolutely looked almost just like that.

throwaway2568 5y ago
The Devs producer met with the Google team in Santa Barbara (which works on very similar superconducting qubits), so it should look very close! That said the whole hovering in free space thing was perhaps a bit over the top in the show. https://qz.com/1826093/devs-creator-alex-garland-describes-the-real-silicon-valley/ https://qz.com/1826093/devs-creator-alex-garland-describes-t...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago

Are there any pictures of the hand-wired LISP Machine online? I searched, but couldn't find it. Also - when LISP was invented (1958) - what was the state of computers at the time? Doing some research - it seems like direct keyboard input to computers was only available for 2 years prior. It seems like languages were decades ahead of hardware. I guess I'm having trouble fathoming how languages were so far ahead while computers were seemingly VERY primitive. Are there any articles on the process for how LISP was designed and implemented??

mixedCase 5y ago
> I guess I'm having trouble fathoming how languages were so far ahead while computers were seemingly VERY primitive. I have a much bigger emotional conflict when contrasting that with the current state of mainstream programming languages, that are only just beginning to tread onto territories like algebraic data types and pattern matching that ML paved almost 50 years ago. Is there any hope for true dependent typing to become popular before 2040?
- onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
  Don't Prolog and Erlang have pattern matching built in??
- orbifold 5y ago
  Lean4 comes pretty close to a general purpose dependently typed programming language.
jasonwatkinspdx 5y ago
> I guess I'm having trouble fathoming how languages were so far ahead while computers were seemingly VERY primitive. My intuition is that back then getting run time on computers was so scarce that the best programmers and mathematicians spent a great deal of brain time considering exactly what their software should be. If you only get one run a day, if that, you're gonna do your best to make it count. Today we're often in the opposite situation, where it can be entirely rational to burn incredible amounts of computation in the absolute sense to save brain time.

tester756 5y ago

is this most advanced tech at this very moment?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

vilhelm_s 5y ago

One of the IBM scientists seems to have an old quantum computer as a piece of office decoration, so I guess there's some hope to preserve them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWJCfOvochA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWJCfOvochA

speculativename 5y ago

I was lucky enough to tour the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York a few months ago and captured several sound recordings of this[0] room housing a quantum computer. Not only do they look cool, they sound very intense! [1] A stark contrast to the minimalist/austere design of the actual enclosure, or maybe it's fitting, depending on your perspective... [0] https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/https%253A%252F%252Fs3-ap-northeast-1.amazonaws.com%252Fpsh-ex-ftnikkei-3937bb4%252Fimages%252F0%252F6%252F1%252F4%252F36024160-7-eng-GB%252Fphoto.JPG?width=700&fit=cover&gravity=faces&dpr=2&quality=medium&source=nar-cms https://www.ft.com/__origami/service/image/v2/images/raw/htt... [1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CeZjXUH6Y8ZvfcS0IM0MWoLNAYJrmSWp/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CeZjXUH6Y8ZvfcS0IM0MWoLNAYJ...

jazzyjackson 5y ago
Yep, definitely the sound of an AI actively hijacking my brain D: thanks

gaze 5y ago

So the chandelier looking thing is a dilution fridge and is just used to make the processor cold. The processor is usually pretty small, not that different from your CPU. That part is indeed iterated on but the fridges aren’t changed much. The wiring is sometimes switched out, but the fridges get used forever. I’m using one now that’s maybe 30 years old. The dilution units are very hard to make, and there’s a very small academic family to which everyone who can make one traces back to. They mostly hang like that since most dil units are designed so the coldest part is usually the lowest, and they’re generally orientation sensitive. You want easy access to the bottom part, so you just put the plates in descending order of temperature and you hang the thing from the ceiling.