Information technology has evolved tremendously in last 2 decades, different technologies and services have emerged that helped grow different business verticals such as pharmaceutical, banking, financial services and insurance, manufacturing, media, entertainment, food & beverages, and many others. Information technology has proved to be of great help to industrial productivity. Different applications, e-commerce, e-governance, and online portal have made our life easier from tedious long process and by reducing human intervene. E-governance has brought in well-refined and transparency in administration. All this is possible because of different services and platform developed by IT organizations and contributors. A thought to feed brain would have been possible without underline architecture, the answer will be no for sure. The largest IaaS Paas & SaaS providers are also relying on the underline architecture. No matter how great and perfect services model are built and developed on top of it, if underlying hardware is not capable enough, the objectives can never be achieved. IT has come across many technological barriers which were overcome, but now we are approaching towards another one.
The world is rapidly running out of computing capacity, Moore's law is kind of running out of steam.
Satya Nadella said at the World Economic Forum in Davos that superfast quantum computers were needed to solve some of the most difficult problems.
In order to address this statement let’s understand about the Moore's law first:
The number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months.
Computing principal at present
Gordon Moore is one of the Intel co-founders. In 1965, Gordon Moore made a prediction by observing emerging trend that computing would increase power and decrease relative cost. He made assumption that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits will double every year since the integrated circuit was invented. But, this law is now believed to be the last till 2020.
The computer processing power depends on the number of transistors used. Transistor is a type of switch which can be respond to either binary 1 or binary 0. The group of transistors into special circuits which are called logic gates allows the computer to perform calculations and make decisions according to man-made computer program. Today, where a typical scale for transistors is 14nm, it has reached to the size of an atom. The 22 core Xeon E5 processors has over 7.2 billion transistors. But as it is reaching out to its physical limits we are approaching a real physical barrier for our technological progress. So, what after this? To solve this problem, scientist are trying to use quantum properties in building quantum computers.
What is Quantum Computing?
Yuri Manin, the Russian physicist and mathematician was the first to propose the idea of quantum computing in 1980. Quantum technology is based on quantum mechanical phenomena. At the present scenario quantum computing is based on binary, the data is encoded into binary digits 'Bits', can be of two definite state 0 or 1, true or false, on or off. Quantum computing uses Quantum bits (Qubits) which can be of any state 0 and 1 simultaneously. Quantum computers work with qubits that are represented by the quantum mechanical states of subatomic particles. Qubit uses two key principals of quantum physics, superposition and entanglement. Superposition means that each qubit can represent 0 or 1 or both at the same time, and entanglement happen when two qubits in a superposition are correlated with one another meaning a state of one whether it’s a 0 or 1 or both depends on the state of another. Using these two principles qubits can act as a much more sophisticated versions of switches, helping quantum computer companies solve difficult problem that are impossible with classic computers.
For example: 2 bits’ data system 0 and 1, will be of four different possible state 00, 01, 10, 11, so computer has to perform four operations to analyze or process data or information. 2 qubit examine all of these possibilities at same time in one operations. So 4 qubit computer could evaluate 16 state in one single operation. In comparison with 4 bits’, computer can analyze only one state in single operation, so it has to repeat the operation for 16 times to process the data.
Emergence of quantum computing
In beginning of this year, on January 8th, Intel unveiled 'Tangle Lake,' a 49-qubit superconducting quantum test chip. A 49-qubit test chip is an important achievement because this will allow researchers to assess and improve error correction techniques and simulate computational problems.
The ability to solve complex algorithms in quick time will bring benefits in many fields. Quantum computing can lead to the discovery of new medicines and materials by helping us untangled the complexities of molecular and chemical interaction by providing better simulations process. One of the areas where quantum technology will make big difference is database searching. To find something in a database, a normal computer may have to test every single one of its entries. Quantum algorithm needs only the square root of that time with which large databases is beneficial. Quantum computing will help in financial modelling and climate forecasting.
