This Week in Engineering explores the latest in engineering from academia, government and industry.
Episode Summary:
IBM has launched a novel processor that is optimized for a special application: finance. The new Telum processor is built for AI integration, which with the right software, can perform real-time analyses of financial transactions and stop fraud as it happens. IBM predicts that the technology will similarly be useful for real-time credit approval for online banking and transaction settlement with very little latency. The processor is built around eight 5 GHz cores and contains an incredible 22 billion transistors.
A global team of university and industry researchers have discovered the root cause of a serious problem in the development of quantum computers: correlation. Detecting and correcting errors is a major roadblock in quantum computer development, and the team’s discovery that single errors can affect a large number of qubits simultaneously is a significant step forward in developing practical quantum computers. Just as significant is the discovery that a major source of these errors are cosmic rays, highly energetic and difficult to screen. Future quantum computers may require heavy radiation shielding for optimum performance.
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Transcript of this week’s show:
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Segment 1: Industry stalwart IBM have announced a new integrated circuit with a difference. The company’s upcoming Telum processor is designed with a special application: transaction fraud. According to IBM, the new processor is IBM’s first that uses on-chip acceleration for AI inferencing while a transaction is taking place. Current systems use detection techniques that catch fraud after it occurs, and due to latency requirements very sophisticated fraud detection frequently can’t happen in real time. For example, criminals may successfully purchase goods with a stolen credit card before the transaction can be flagged or stopped.
Segment 2: Quantum computing promises great devices with problem-solving capabilities that are orders of magnitude better than the fastest supercomputers today. While the payoff is considerable, engineering quantum computers is extraordinarily difficult. They operate at cryogenic temperatures and in quantum realms where conventional material science and traditional binary logic simply don’t apply. A major problem is error correction.
So far, quantum computing is severely constrained by the need to detect and correct errors in real time, and new research by a large team from the University of Wisconsin Madison, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University, INFN Sezione di Roma, and Google Inc. suggests that there is a new and previously unforeseen cause for quantum computing errors and how quantum circuits react to them. The team built a quantum testbed device and discovered an unusual property: fluctuations in the electrical charge of multiple quantum bits or qubits, the fundamental unit of quantum computer, are not random and independent.
If a random burst of energy enters from outside the system, it affects every qubit in the vicinity of that event simultaneously, a phenomenon the team calls “correlation”. This creates errors that can instantly span the entire system. Previous error correction techniques have assumed that errors can be tracked to a point source, but the new theory suggests that entire system can be simultaneously disrupted, complicating the error correction process. Just as interesting is the analysis of the source of many errors: gamma radiation from cosmic rays.
Cosmic rays are highly energetic atomic nuclei that come from multiple sources outside our solar system. Most are deflected by the Earth’s magnetic field, but some get through and on hitting the Earth’s atmosphere create a secondary emission of other particles that scientists call an “air shower”. These charged particles have been known to create errors in conventional integrated circuit electronics. In 1990, an IBM study showed that conventional computers experience one cosmic ray induced error per 256 MB of RAM per month on average.
Error correction code or ECC memory was developed to address this issue, but the unusual behavior of quantum state devices, namely correlation, makes the radiation challenge much more difficult to solve. 6 inches or more of dense radiation shielding might prove to be the easiest technique to mitigate cosmic ray induced errors in quantum computers, but some particles are highly energetic and it’s unlikely that a truly radiation proof processor we will be developed anytime soon. Error detection and correction through software will be with us for a long time to come.
