The Change Mariner

DARPA's $2.8 Billion Quantum Computing Project

InformationWeek :

At a late-January meeting in a Marriott off the Washington beltway in Falls Church, Va., the Defense Department's main technology-research arm floated a proposal as nearly 100 scientists listened. They'd come from Boeing, IBM, Lockheed Martin, and other companies; from the Army, the Navy, and NASA; and from leading universities to hear a proposal for accelerating efforts to build a computer that theoretically could exist inside a coffee cup.

Within the next several months, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which will spend more than $2.8 billion this year on research and development for the Pentagon, is expected to launch a multimillion-dollar program to kick-start U.S. research in quantum computing, an esoteric area of inquiry under way at government labs, universities, and companies such as AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Microsoft. These supercomputers--built according to the strange laws of quantum physics, often operating at temperatures nearing absolute zero, and occupying spaces that can resemble a vial of liquid more than an electronic box--theoretically could perform within seconds calculations that take today's machines hours and solve in hours problems that might require centuries if run on state-of-the-art silicon.

Posted by Bob King at May 10, 2004 01:49 AM | TrackBack
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