Category Archives: Quantum Computing
This simple explainer tackles the complexity of quantum computing – Boing Boing
Many videos describing quantum computers try to distill and oversimplify everything. Thoughty's takes its time and gives more historical and theoretical context than most.
Because it does take a while to get into the subject, here's a shorter explainer by MIT:
Today's computers use bitsa stream of electrical or optical pulses representing1s or0s. Everything from your tweets and e-mails to your iTunes songs and YouTube videos are essentially long strings of these binary digits.
Quantum computers, on the other hand, usequbits, whichare typically subatomic particles such as electrons or photons. Generating and managing qubits is a scientific and engineering challenge. Some companies, such as IBM, Google, and Rigetti Computing, use superconducting circuits cooled to temperatures colder than deep space. Others, like IonQ, trap individual atoms in electromagnetic fields on a silicon chip in ultra-high-vacuum chambers. In both cases, the goal is to isolate the qubits in a controlled quantum state.
The processing power possible through these controlled qubits will make today's fastest computers look positively archaic.
Image: YouTube / Thoughty2
Intelligence is a surprisingly difficult thing to define. Kurzgesagt jumps into the debate with an interesting overview of where intelligence begins. Is a slime mold intelligent? Are plants intelligent?
Wildfires are a natural part of many ecosystems, though more and more are human-caused. Wendover Productions takes a look at how firefighters work to minimize the spread of wildfires in grueling and dangerous conditions.
Because of its ubiquity, the landscape is littered with proposed etymologies of the term OK. This nice explainer clarifies the murky origins of one of the most widely spoken words in the world.
Back in the old days of the 20th century, practicality was the biggest reason most people wore a watch. If you didnt have a clock face right on your wrist, how else would you know the time? Of course, in the age of smartphones and even smartwatches, the time is available virtually everywhere at any []
Its bad enough when regular food stuff gets stale after a couple days sitting on your kitchen counter. But when infused edibles start losing their freshnesswell, heck, edibles arent cheap! If youre going to do edibles, you may as well do them right, which means having the equipment to make sure your product remains both []
CBD-infused coffee almost sounds like the premise for a bad sitcom episode. But seriouslyisnt it almost comical to consider what happens when the go-go kick of high-octane caffeine slams headlong into the calming, tranquil effects of CBD? The reality is, it actually can be the best of both worlds situation for many CBD coffee fans. []
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This simple explainer tackles the complexity of quantum computing - Boing Boing
UK firm reaches final stages of the NIST quest for quantum-proof encryption algorithms – www.computing.co.uk
Post Quantum CEO Andersen Cheng
London-based encryption specialist Post Quantum has reached the final stage of the NIST competition to find practical encryption standards capable of withstanding attacks by a quantum computer.
The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) launched its competition for Public-Key Post-Quantum Cryptographic Algorithms, in 2016 with the aim of arriving at quantum-safe standards by 2024. Successful candidates will enhance or replace the three paradigms considered most vulnerable to quantum attack: the digital signature standard FIPS 186-4 and the public key cryptography standards NIST SP 800-56AandNIST SP 800-56B.
Many of the current encryption algorithms use one-way functions to derive encryption/decryption key pairs, for example factorising very large integers into primes. This method is used by the general purpose RSA algorithms that form the basis of the secure internet protocols SSL and TLS. Elliptic curve cryptography, often preferred in IoT and mobile devices, also uses a one-way mathematical function. Unfortunately both are vulnerable to attack by quantum computers.
Last year NIST whittled down the original 69 candidates to 26, and in a third round announced last week reduced this number to 15: seven finalists "most likely to be ready for standardisation soon after the end of the third round", and eight alternate candidates' "regarded as potential candidates for future standardisation". Candidates fall into three functional categories: Code-based, multivariate and lattice-based cryptography, which cover the variety of different use cases for which post quantum (PQ) encryption will be required. In addition, some candidates are suitable for public key exchange while others are better suited to digital signatures.
The only remaining candidate in the code-based category is Classic McEliece, which is a merger of Post Quantum's Never-The-Same Key Encapsulation Mechanism (NTS-KEM) and work done in the same area by a team led by Professor Daniel Bernstein of University of Illinois at Chicago. The joint candidate, known as Classic McEliece', is based on the McEliece cryptosystem first proposed in the 1970s.
It works by injecting random error codes into the cyphertext. The error correction codes allow the recipient of the encrypted message to cut out the random noise added to the message when decrypting it, a facility not available to any eavesdropper intercepting the message.
"Classic McEliece has a somewhat unusual performance profileit has a very large public key but the smallest ciphertexts of all competing KEMs [key-encapsulation mechanisms]. This is not a good fit for general use in internet protocols as they are currently specified, but in some applications, the very small ciphertext size could make Classic McEliece an appealing choice," NIST says, offering a possible use case as protecting VPNs.
Cheng said he was pleased to join forces with Bernstein's team, adding that the need for viable PQ encryption is urgent.
"The entire world needs to upgrade its encryption, and we last did that in 1978, when RSA came in. The stakes couldn't be higher with record levels of cyber-attack and heightened nation state activity - if China or Russia is the first to crack RSA then cyber Armageddon will begin," Cheng said.
"This isn't an academic exercise for us, we are already several years down the commercialisation path with real-world quantum-safe products for identity authentication and VPN. If you work for an organisation with intellectual property or critical data with a long shelf life, and you're working from home during lockdown, you should already be using a quantum-safe VPN."
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UK firm reaches final stages of the NIST quest for quantum-proof encryption algorithms - http://www.computing.co.uk
Looking Back on The First-Ever Photo of Quantum Entanglement – ScienceAlert
This stunning image captured last year by physicists at the University of Glasgow in Scotland is the first-ever photo of quantum entanglement - a phenomenon so strange, physicist Albert Einstein famously described it as 'spooky action at a distance'.
It might not look like much, but just stop and think about it for a second: this fuzzy grey image was the first time we'd seen the particle interaction that underpins the strange science of quantum mechanics and forms the basis of quantum computing.
Quantum entanglement occurs when two particles become inextricably linked, and whatever happens to one immediately affects the other, regardless of how far apart they are. Hence the 'spooky action at a distance' description.
This particular photo shows entanglement between two photons - two light particles. They're interacting and - for a brief moment - sharing physical states.
Paul-Antoine Moreau, first author of the paper wherein the image was unveiled back in July 2019, told the BBC the image was "an elegant demonstration of a fundamental property of nature".
To capture the incredible photo, Moreau and a team of physicists created a system that blasted out streams of entangled photons at what they described as 'non-conventional objects'.
The experiment actually involved capturing four images of the photons under four different phase transitions. You can see the full image below:
(Moreau et al., Science Advances, 2019)
What you're looking at here is actually a composite of multiple images of the photons as they go through a series of four phase transitions.
The physicists split the entangled photons up and ran one beam through a liquid crystal material known as -barium borate, triggering four phase transitions.
At the same time they captured photos of the entangled pair going through the same phase transitions, even though it hadn't passed through the liquid crystal.
You can see the setup below: The entangled beam of photons comes from the bottom left, one half of the entangled pair splits to the left and passes through the four phase filters. The others that go straight ahead didn't go through the filters, but underwent the same phase changes.
(Moreau et al., Science Advances, 2019)
The camera was able to capture images of these at the same time, showing that they'd both shifted the same way despite being split. In other words, they were entangled.
While Einstein made quantum entanglement famous, the late physicist John Stewart Bell helped define quantum entanglement and established a test known as 'Bell inequality'. Basically, if you can break Bell inequality, you can confirm true quantum entanglement.
"Here, we report an experiment demonstrating the violation of a Bell inequality within observed images," the team wrote in Science Advances.
"This result both opens the way to new quantum imaging schemes ... and suggests promise for quantum information schemes based on spatial variables."
The research was published in Science Advances.
A version of this article was first published in July 2019.
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Looking Back on The First-Ever Photo of Quantum Entanglement - ScienceAlert
Quantum reckoning: The day when computers will break cryptography – ITWeb
Roger Grimes
An age of unbelievably fast quantum computers is only a stones throw away, promising machines that will forever transform the way we solve problems, communicate and compute.
However, such powerful machines in the wrong hands could spell major trouble for the cyber security community, as many experts fear that quantum computers could also effectively break even the strongest encryption we have today.
So when can we expect to see these quantum machines in action? Theres a chance that it has already happened, by either the US NSA (National Security Agency) or China, but we dont publicly know about it yet," says Roger Grimes, Data-Driven Defence evangelist at KnowBe4, who will be speaking on Quantum reckoning: The coming day when quantum computers break cryptography at ITWeb Security Summit 2020, to be held as a virtual event from 25 to 28 August this year.
According to Grimes, if it hasnt happened already, many people believe it will happen within the next two years.
Speaking of how this quantum reckoning could impact information security, Grimes says any secret protected by traditional asymmetric ciphers will no longer be protected. This includes RSA, Diffie-Hellman, Elliptic Curve Cryptography which is used in HTTPS, TLS, WiFi, FIDO keys, PKI, digital certificates, digital signatures and banking networks. Essentially, it would impact about 95% of our digital world.
Its not all bad news, though. He says along with the dangers, quantum computing will bring us many wonderful inventions we cannot even begin to imagine right now, much as the Internet did, but on an even greater scale.
There is a glimmer of hope in that post-quantum cryptography, or cryptographic algorithms that are believed to be secure against an attack by a quantum computer, might save the day.
Grimes says its a race, but that dozens of good quantum-resistant cryptography standards are being tested right now and there are likely to be some good standards in place by the time the quantum reckoning becomes public and widespread.
But once the new cryptography standards are in place, how long will it take every person and company and the world to switch over to the new quantum-resistant standards? That is the real problem, he adds.
Delegates attending Grimes talk will learn exactly what it is they need to start doing now in order to prepare for the quantum reckoning.
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Quantum reckoning: The day when computers will break cryptography - ITWeb
Ripple CTO: Quantum computers will be a threat to Bitcoin and XRP – Crypto News Flash
In a chapter of the Modern CTO podcast, Ripples CTO, David Schwartz, expressed concerns about the development of quantum computers. Ripples CTO believes this technology is a threat to the security of Bitcoin, XRP, and cryptocurrencies. This is primarily because the consensus algorithms behind cryptocurrencies rely on conventional cryptography, as Schwartz stated:
From the point of view of someone who is building systems based on conventional cryptography, quantum computing is a risk. We are not solving problems that need powerful computing like payments and liquidity the work that the computers do is not that incredibly complicated, but because it relies on conventional cryptography, very fast computers present a risk to the security model that we use inside the ledger.
Algorithms like SHA-2 and ECDSA (elliptic curve cryptography) are sort of esoteric things deep in the plumbing but if they were to fail, the whole system would collapse. The systems ability to say who owns Bitcoin or who owns XRP or whether or not a particular transaction is authorized would be compromised().
Ripples CTO said that Ripple is trying to prepare for the emergence of quantum computers. Therefore, they are determining when the algorithms mentioned will no longer be reliable. Ripples CTO estimates that in the next 8-10 years, quantum computers will begin to pose a threat, as Schwartz further stated:
I think we have at least eight years. I have very high confidence that its at least a decade before quantum computing presents a threat, but you never know when there could be a breakthrough. Im a cautious and concerned observer, I would say.
The other fear would be if some bad actor, some foreign government, secretly had quantum computing way ahead of whats known to the public. Depending on your threat model, you could also say what if the NSA has quantum computing. Are you worried about the NSA breaking your payment system?
Despite the above, Ripples CTO made an optimistic conclusion and stated that even if there is a malicious actor with this technology, he will not use it against the average person. Therefore, Schwartz believes that most users have nothing to worry about:
While some people might really be concerned it depends on your threat model, if youre just an average person or an average company, youre probably not going to be a victim of this lets say hypothetically some bad actor had quantum computing that was powerful enough to break things, theyre probably not going to go after you unless you are a target of that type of actor.
As soon as its clear that theres a problem, these systems will probably be frozen until they can be fixed or improved. So, most people dont have to worry about it.
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Ripple CTO: Quantum computers will be a threat to Bitcoin and XRP - Crypto News Flash
The 6 Biggest Technology Trends In Accounting And Finance – Forbes
The explosion in data that has launched the Fourth Industrial Revolution, an era when business will be transformed by cyber-physical systems, has enabled several technology trends to develop. Every business can leverage these important trends and should pay attention to how best to use them, but accountants should really evaluate how these six technologies can be used strategically to achieve the companys business strategy.
The 6 Biggest Technology Trends In Accounting and Finance
1.Big Data
Data is crucial to make business financial decisions. Today, data isn't just numbers and spreadsheets that accountants have been familiar with for years; it also includes unstructured data that can be analyzed through natural language processing. This can allow for real-time status monitoring of financial matters. Data is the fuel that powers other technology trends that are transforming finance and accounting in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Even the audit process has been digitalized. In the financial realm, data produces valuable insights, drives results and creates a better experience for clients. Since everything leaves a digital footprint, the unprecedented digitalization of our world is creating opportunities to glean new insights from data that wasnt possible before. These insights help improve internal operations and build revenue.
2.Increased Computing Power
Just as it is for other companies, all the data created by our digitalized world would be useless or at least less powerful if it weren't for the advances in computing power. These changes allow accounting and finance departments and firms to store and use the data effectively. First, there are the cloud services from providers such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft that provide scalable systems and software to leverage that can be accessed wherever and whenever it's needed. Edge computing has also grown. This is where the computing happens not in the cloud, but right where the data is collected. The adoption of 5G (fifth generation) cellular network technology will be the backbone of a smarter world. When quantum computing is fully adopted, it will be transformative in a way that cannot even be predicted at this point since it
will catapult our computing power exponentially. Quantum computers will be able to provide services and solve problems that werent possible with traditional computers. There will be tremendous value in the financial world for this capability.
3.Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial intelligence can help accounting and finance professionals be more productive. AI algorithms allow machines to take over time-consuming, repetitive, and redundant tasks. Rather than just crunch numbers, with the support of AI, financial professionals will be able to spend more time delivering actionable insight. Machines can help reduce costs and errors by streamlining operations. The more finance professionals rely on AI to do what it does bestanalyze and process a tremendous amount of data and take care of monotonous tasksthe more time humans will recover to do what they do best. New technology has changed the expectations clients have when working with companies, and it's the same for accounting. AI helps accountants be more efficient.
4.Intelligence of Things
When the internet of things, the system of interconnected devices and machines, combines with artificial intelligence, the result is the intelligence of things. These items can communicate and operate without human intervention and offer many advantages for accounting systems and finance professionals. The intelligence of things helps finance professionals track ledgers, transactions, and other records in real-time. With the support of artificial intelligence, patterns can be identified, or issues can be resolved quickly. This continuous monitoring makes accounting activities such as audits much more streamlined and stress-free. In addition, the intelligence of things improves inventory tracking and management.
5.Autonomous Robots
Robots don't have to be physical entities. In accounting and finance, robotic process automation (RPA) can handle repetitive and time-consuming tasks such as document analysis and processing, which is abundant in any accounting department. Freed up from these mundane tasks, accountants are able to spend time on strategy and advisory work. Intelligent automation (IA) is capable of mimicking human interaction and can even understand inferred meaning in client communication and adapt to an activity based on historical data. In addition, drones and unmanned aerial vehicles can even be deployed on appraisals and the like.
6. Blockchain
The final tech trend that has significant implications for accounting and finance professionals that I wish to cover is blockchain. A distributed ledger or blockchain is a highly secure database. It's a way to securely store and accurately record data, which has broad applications in accounting and financial records. Blockchain enables smart contracts, protecting and transferring ownership of assets, verifying people's identities and credentials, and more. Once blockchain is widely adopted, and challenges around industry regulation are overcome, it will benefit businesses by reducing costs, increasing traceability, and enhancing security.
To learn more about these technology trends as well as other key trends that are shaping the 4th industrial revolution, you can take a look at my new book, Tech Trends in Practice: The 25 Technologies That Are Driving The 4th Industrial Revolution
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The 6 Biggest Technology Trends In Accounting And Finance - Forbes
Hear how three startups are approaching quantum computing differently at TC Disrupt 2020 – TechCrunch
Quantum computing is at an interesting point. Its at the cusp of being mature enough to solve real problems. But like in the early days of personal computers, there are lots of different companies trying different approaches to solving the fundamental physics problems that underly the technology, all while another set of startups is looking ahead and thinking about how to integrate these machines with classical computers and how to write software for them.
At Disrupt 2020 on September 14-18, we will have a panel with D-Wave CEO Alan Baratz, Quantum Machines co-founder and CEO Itamar Sivan and IonQ president and CEO Peter Chapman. The leaders of these three companies are all approaching quantum computing from different angles, yet all with the same goal of making this novel technology mainstream.
D-Wave may just be the best-known quantum computing company thanks to an early start and smart marketing in its early days. Alan Baratz took over as CEO earlier this year after a few years as chief product officer and executive VP of R&D at the company. Under Baratz, D-Wave has continued to build out its technology and especially its D-Wave quantum cloud service. Leap 2, the latest version of its efforts, launched earlier this year. D-Waves technology is also very different from that of many other efforts thanks to its focus on quantum annealing. That drew a lot of skepticism in its early days, but its now a proven technology and the company is now advancing both its hardware and software platform.
Like Baratz, IonQs Peter Chapman isnt a founder either. Instead, he was the engineering director for Amazon Prime before joining IonQ in 2019. Under his leadership, the company raised a $55 million funding round in late 2019, which the company extended by another $7 million last month. He is also continuing IonQs bet on its trapped ion technology, which makes it relatively easy to create qubits and which, the company argues, allows it to focus its efforts on controlling them. This approach also has the advantage that IonQs machines are able to run at room temperature, while many of its competitors have to cool their machines to as close to zero Kelvin as possible, which is an engineering challenge in itself, especially as these companies aim to miniaturize their quantum processors.
Quantum Machines plays in a slightly different part of the ecosystem from D-Wave and IonQ. The company, which recently raised $17.5 million in a Series A round, is building a quantum orchestration platform that combines novel custom hardware for controlling quantum processors because once quantum machines reach a bit more maturity, a standard PC wont be fast enough to control them with a matching software platform and its own QUA language for programming quantum algorithms. Quantum Machines is Itamar Sivans first startup, which he launched with his co-founders after getting his Ph.D. in condensed matter and material physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Come to Disrupt 2020 and hear from these companies and others on September 14-18. Get a front-row seat with your Digital Pro Pass for just $245 or with a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package for $445. Prices are increasing next week, so grab yours today to save up to $300.
Ripple Executive Says Quantum Computing Will Threaten Bitcoin, XRP and Crypto Markets Heres When – The Daily Hodl
Ripple CTO David Schwartz says quantum computing poses a serious threat to the future of cryptocurrency.
On the Modern CTO Podcast, Schwartz says quantum computing will break the cryptographic algorithms that keep cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) and XRP as well as the internet at large secure.
From the point of view of someone who is building systems based on conventional cryptography, quantum computing is a risk. We are not solving problems that need powerful computing like payments and liquidity the work that the computers do is not that incredibly complicated, but because it relies on conventional cryptography, very fast computers present a risk to the security model that we use inside the ledger.
Algorithms like SHA-2 and ECDSA (elliptic curve cryptography) are sort of esoteric things deep in the plumbing but if they were to fail, the whole system would collapse. The systems ability to say who owns Bitcoin or who owns XRP or whether or not a particular transaction is authorized would be compromised
A lot of people in the blockchain space watch quantum computing very carefully and what were trying to do is have an assessment of how long before these algorithms are no longer reliable.
Schwartz says he thinks developers have at least eight years until the technology, which leverages the properties of quantum physics to perform fast calculations, becomes sophisticated enough to crack cryptocurrency.
I think we have at least eight years. I have very high confidence that its at least a decade before quantum computing presents a threat, but you never know when there could be a breakthrough. Im a cautious and concerned observer, I would say.
Schwartz says crypto coders should closely follow the latest public developments in quantum computing, but hes also concerned about private efforts from the government.
The other fear would be if some bad actor, some foreign government, secretly had quantum computing way ahead of whats known to the public. Depending on your threat model, you could also say what if the NSA has quantum computing. Are you worried about the NSA breaking your payment system?
While some people might realistically be concerned it depends on your threat model, if youre just an average person or an average company, youre probably not going to be a victim of this lets say hypothetically some bad actor had quantum computing that was powerful enough to break things, theyre probably not going to go after you unless you are a target of that type of actor. As soon as its clear that theres a problem, these systems will probably be frozen until they can be fixed or improved. So, most people dont have to worry about it.
Featured Image: Shutterstock/Elena11
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Ripple Executive Says Quantum Computing Will Threaten Bitcoin, XRP and Crypto Markets Heres When - The Daily Hodl
D-Waves quantum computing cloud comes to India – The Hindu
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Canadian quantum computing company D-Wave Systems is launching its cloud service in India, giving developers and researchers in the country real-time access to its quantum computers.
Through this geographic expansion, D-Waves 2000Q quantum computers, hybrid solvers and the application environment can be used via its cloud platform Leap to drive development of business-critical and in-production hybrid applications.
Quantum computing is poised to fundamentally transform the way businesses solve critical problems, leading to new efficiencies and profound business value in industries like transportation, finance, pharmaceuticals and much more, Murray Thom, VP of Software and Services at D-Wave, said in a statement.
The future of quantum computing is in the cloud. Thats why we were eager to expand Leap to India and Australia, where vibrant tech scenes will have access to real-time quantum computers and the hybrid solver service for the first time, unlocking new opportunities across industries.
As part of this rollout, users in India and Australia can work on the D-Waves Leap and Leap 2 platforms.
The two cloud platforms offer updated features and tools, including hybrid solver service that can solve large and complex problems of up to 10,000 variables; and integrated developer environment that has a prebuilt, ready-to-code environment in the cloud configured with the latest Ocean SDK for quantum hybrid development in Python.
D-Waves systems and software have been used in financial modelling, machine learning and route optimization.
Its latest launch in India comes about a year after the countrys Department of Science and Technology (DST) chalked out plans to build its own quantum computers.
In early 2019, DST launched a programme focused on quantum computing, called Quantum-Enabled Science and Technology (QuEST). As part of QuEST, India earmarked 80 crore investment to be spent over a span of three years to facilitate research in setting up quantum computers.
A year later, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in her Union Budget 2020 Speech, announced a National Mission on Quantum Technologies and Applications (NM-QTA) with an outlay of 8,000 crore for the next five years.
Quantum technology is opening up new frontiers in computing, communications, cyber security with wide-spread applications, Sitharaman said in her Budget Speech.
It is expected that lots of commercial applications would emerge from theoretical constructs which are developing in this area.
NM-QTAs focus, as outlined by the minister, will be in fundamental science, translation, technology development and, human and infrastructural resource generation.
Other areas of quantum computing applications will include aero-space engineering, numerical weather prediction, simulations, securing communication and financial transactions, cyber-security, and advanced manufacturing.
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D-Waves quantum computing cloud comes to India - The Hindu
The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Dr. Michael Resch Talks about the Leap from von Neumann: ‘I Tell My PhD Candidates: Go for Quantum’ – insideHPC
Dr. Michael M. Resch of the University of Stuttgart has professorships, degrees, doctorates and honorary doctorates from around the world, he has studied and taught in Europe and the U.S., but for all the work he has done in supercomputing for the past three-plus decades, he boils down his years in HPC to working with the same, if always improving, von Neumann architecture. Hes eager for the next new thing: quantum. Going to quantum computing, we have to throw away everything and we have to start anew, he says. This is a great time.
In This Update. From The HPC User Forum Steering Committee
By Steve Conway and Thomas Gerard
After the global pandemic forced Hyperion Research to cancel the April 2020 HPC User Forum planned for Princeton, New Jersey, we decided to reach out to the HPC community in another way by publishing a series of interviews with members of the HPC User Forum Steering Committee. Our hope is that these seasoned leaders perspectives on HPCs past, present and future will be interesting and beneficial to others. To conduct the interviews, Hyperion Research engaged insideHPC Media.
We welcome comments and questions addressed to Steve Conway, sconway@hyperionres.com or Earl Joseph, ejoseph@hyperionres.com.
This interview is with Michael M. Resch. Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. He is dean of the faculty for energy-process and biotechnology of the University of Stuttgart, director of the High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), the Department for High Performance Computing, and the Information Center (IZUS), all at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He was an invited plenary speaker at SC07. He chairs the board of the German Gauss Center for Supercomputing (GCS) and serves on the advisory councils for Triangle Venture Capital Group and several foundations. He is on the advisory board of the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing (PC2). He holds a degree in technical mathematics from the Technical University of Graz, Austria and a Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Stuttgart. He was an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Houston and was awarded honorary doctorates by the National Technical University of Donezk (Ukraine) and the Russian Academy of Science.
He was interviewed by Dan Olds, HPC and big data consultant at Orionx.net.
The HPC User Forum was established in 1999 to promote the health of the global HPC industry and address issues of common concern to users. More than 75 HPC User Forum meetings have been held in the Americas, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region since the organizations founding in 2000.
Olds: Hello, Im Dan Olds on behalf of Hyperion Research and insideHPC, and today Im talking to Michael Resch, who is an honorable professor at the HPC Center in Stuttgart, Germany. How are you, Michael?
Resch: I am fine, Dan. Thanks.
Olds: Very nice to talk to you. I guess lets start at the beginning. How did you get involved in HPC in the first place?
Resch: That started when I was a math student and I was invited to work as a student research assistant and, by accident, that was roughly the month when a new supercomputer was coming into the Technical University of Graz. So, I put my hands on that machine and I never went away again.
Olds: You sort of made that machine yours, I guess?
Resch: We were only three users. There were three user groups and I was the most important user of my user group because I did all the programming.
Olds: Fantastic, thats a way to make yourself indispensable, isnt it?
Resch: In a sense.
Olds: So, can you kind of summarize your HPC background over the years?
Resch: I started doing blood flow simulations, so I at first looked into this very traditional Navier-Stokes equation that was driving HPC for a long time. Then I moved on to groundwater flow simulations pollution of groundwater, tunnel construction work, and everything until after like five years I moved to the University of Stuttgart, where I started to work with supercomputers, more focusing on the programming side, the performance side, than on the hardware side. This is sort of my background in terms of experience.
In terms of education, I studied a mixture of mathematics, computer science and economics, and then did a Ph.D. in engineering, which was convenient if youre working in Navier-Stokes equations. So, I try to bring all of these things together to make an impact in HPC.
Olds: What are some of the biggest changes youve seen in HPC over your career?
Resch: Well, the biggest change is probably that when I started, as I said, there were three user groups. These were outstanding experts in their field, but supercomputing was nothing for the rest of the university. Today, everybody is using HPC. Thats probably the biggest change, that we are moving from something where you had one big system and a few experts around that system, and you moved to a larger number of systems and tens of thousands of experts working with them.
Olds: And, so, the systems have to get bigger, of course.
Resch: Well, certainly, they have to get bigger. And they have to get, I would say, more usable. Thats another feature, that now things are more hidden from the user, which makes it easier to use them. But at the same time, it takes away some of the performance. There is this combination of hiding things away from the user and then the massive parallelism that we saw, and thats the second most important thing that I think we saw in the last three decades. That has made it much more difficult to get high sustained performance.
Olds: Where do you see HPC headed in the future? Is there anything that has you particularly excited or concerned?
Resch: [Laughs] Im always excited and concerned. Thats just normal. Thats what happens when you go into science and thats normal when you work with supercomputers. I see, basically, two things happening. The first thing is that people will merge everything that has to do with data and everything that has to do with simulation. I keep saying its data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence. Its sort of a development from raw data to very intelligent handling of data. And these data-intensive things start to merge with simulation, like we see people trying to understand what they did over the last 20 years by employing artificial intelligence to work its way through the data trying to find what we have already done and what should we do next, things like that.
The second thing that is exciting is quantum computing. Its exciting because its out of the ordinary, in a sense. You might say that over the last 32 years the only thing I did was work with improved technology and improved methods and improved algorithms or whatever, but I was still working in the same John von Neumann architecture concept. Going to quantum computing we have to throw away everything and we have to start anew. This is a great time. I keep telling my Ph.D. candidates, go for quantum computing. This is where you make an impact. This is where you have a wide-open field of things you can explore and this is what is going to make the job exciting for the next 10, 12, 15 years or so.
Olds: Thats fantastic and your enthusiasm for this really comes through. Your enthusiasm for HPC, for the new computing methods, and all that. And, thank you so much for taking the time.
Resch: It was a pleasure. Thank you.
Olds: Thank you, really appreciate it.
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The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Dr. Michael Resch Talks about the Leap from von Neumann: 'I Tell My PhD Candidates: Go for Quantum' - insideHPC