We are coming to you live from the coldest place in the known universe!
Well, near it anyway.
What would you say if I told you that the headquarters for D-Wave,
the world leader in commercial quantum computing systems,
is a stone's throw from our warehouse?
And what would you say if I told you that they invited us in for a behind-the-scenes tour?
Well, Linus, I'd probably say that's exactly what I was expecting,
given the title and thumbnail of this video.
Stop wasting my time!
Got it! Let's go!
Cooler Master's 25th anniversary edition, Cosmos II,
features a unique dual curved tempered glass side panel.
Check it out now at the link below.
So, in 2007, D-Wave introduced their first quantum processor.
Now, with only 16 qubits, it wasn't especially powerful,
but the point wasn't whether you could or couldn't solve the same problems
with a 5-inch processor.
You could use a pencil and a piece of paper.
The point was that this scalable approach
would allow them to ship the world's first commercial quantum computer,
the D-Wave I, in 2011 with 128 qubits,
followed by 512, 1000, and 2000 qubit designs
in 2013, 2015, and 2017, respectively.
And adding more qubits is the key to increasing performance,
because the more qubits you add,
the more complex the problems that you can tackle.
You see, quantum computing doesn't work like classical computing
with ones and zeros where you feed it a question
and then it spits out an answer.
Instead, a quantum processor takes all of the parameters you feed it
and works on every solution,
pointing you at one or two or maybe even more optimal solutions.
So they're not perfect for everything.
I don't think there's a single person in this building
who expects Call of Duty Black Ops 10
to run on a D-Wave Mach 5 quantum gaming rig or anything like that.
But for scheduling out a sports team's games over the course of a season,
for tackling problems like logistics, climate change, and energy distribution,
or for conducting AI research,
these puppies right here
have the potential to completely disrupt the existing players.
So then let's go have a look at one, shall we?
Now, there are only a handful of customers in the world
who have actually ponied up the price of a D-Wave system,
including high rollers like Lockheed Martin,
Los Alamos National Lab, Google, and NASA.
But D-Wave themselves have a handful
of their latest generation 2000 Q7
systems running here at their headquarters
that are available through the cloud.
Just make sure that you don't turn off any of the ones
with a delightfully low-tech online sign zip-tied to it.
It might be doing very, very important research.
So from the outside, a 2000 Q doesn't look that different
from any other compute cluster with a few black racks.
And when you open up door number one,
there's not much at first glance
to indicate that there's anything special
about it.
You'll find a network switch, a UPS for battery backup,
a normal server responsible for monitoring,
some monitoring devices that...
Wait a minute.
Seven, eight degrees milli-Kelvin?
We're gonna have to get back to that later.
There's also a second server that takes a problem
and translates it into machine code
using custom room-temperature electricity
electronics to generate high-precision analog signals
that it then sends to, as we promised,
just about the coldest place in the known universe,
the single, yes, just one chip,
single codename Washington quantum processor
at the heart of this machine.
But where exactly is it?
It's not behind door two or door number three.
Back there, you'll find the first
and second stage pumps that are used
to create a vacuum around the processor
to thermally insulate it
and its cooling system from the outside world,
as well as a compressor
for the aforementioned cooling system.
And you also won't find it in this barrel-shaped doodad.
That is actually a liquid nitrogen filter
that removes impurities from the coolant mixture
of helium-3 and helium-4 isotopes
and is one of the things
that allows D-Wave systems to run
for years at a time,
a critical feature given that the chip
kind of locks into a certain configuration
once it's super cooled.
And if you heat one of these puppies up
back to room temperature,
it can take up to two days
to cool it back down
and up to four weeks
to finish the rebalancing
or recalibration process.
No, no, to find the actual processor,
we have to go past
this first door on the left here
that handles connecting the
all-business racks at the front
to the giant box here
that was hiding in plain sight
that I'll be referring to as the
party in the back
or, per D-Wave's gentle suggestion,
the shielded enclosure.
This right here is effectively
a big Faraday cage
and the first of 16 layers
of shielding that are designed
to shield the power lines
and preserve the integrity
of the signals to and from
the quantum processor
to the greatest degree possible.
And that was a very intentional pun,
by the way.
Now, normally, these rooms are closed
and there is a series of casings
on top of this apparatus here
to maintain the vacuum around
what is effectively
the motherboard of our quantum computer.
But they had one open for maintenance today,
so we got to get up close and personal.
The thing is peppered
with probes and sensors,
heat exchangers, data wires,
but the five big plates
are really the main attraction here.
Each of them represents a different stage
of the cooling system.
The top one gets signals
from the outside world
on copper wires
and runs at a frosty 70 degrees Kelvin.
The next one down uses the same fridge
and these braided copper conductors
to get down to four degrees Kelvin,
which is both low enough
to condense helium to a liquid
and to switch over from copper wires
to the superconductor niobium.
The middle plate here uses vacuumed helium-4
to drop our signal wires
to one degree Kelvin.
The fourth uses helium-3
to get us to about a tenth of that.
And the final stage uses a sophisticated mixture
of those two isotopes
to drive this entire filtering
and shielding apparatus
as well as the processor inside
down to its typical operating temperature
of about 0.015 degrees Kelvin,
damn near absolute zero.
But why does it need to be so cold?
Niobium already superconducts at nine degrees Kelvin.
Interstellar space is 3.1 degrees Kelvin.
Our solar system is even warmer.
We're talking 0.015 degrees Kelvin.
Well, this superconducting chip here
is what's inside there,
and it's connected via 400 superconducting wires.
And this is kind of like the pins
on a CPU socket.
And what it's doing
is it's using quantum mechanical effects
to process information.
So for that to work,
these effects need to be significant enough
to use them for computation,
which means that the temperature
needs to be well below
the energy scale of those quantum effects.
If it wasn't,
then the data you'd get
would be very, very noisy,
corrupted by heat-related quantum effects.
That's why the colder they can get,
pretty much the better.
And getting even colder in the future
may actually be practical.
So this generation of D-Waves processors
consumes no power
and outputs no heat,
meaning that the 20 kilowatts of power
that are required to run the system
is just dedicated to the cooling system.
So unless they wanted to go colder,
this energy cost doesn't change
whether you're running 100 qubits
or 2,000 qubits.
That's just the sweet spot
of practicality and functionality today.
And more cooling is far from the only thing
on the horizon.
The future's looking bright
for our neighbors here at D-Wave.
They don't have a 50-year vision yet necessarily,
but in the nearer term,
they don't really perceive anyone else in the space
as a real competitor
with a commercializable technology.
And with more R&D focus,
they think their system could be as compact
as three or four racks
and capable of taking on
some of the hardest neural network problems
that we face in the years to come.
And you know what?
Sounds pretty good to me.
Dollar Shave Club is kind of amazing.
You can get their high-quality blades
and their amazing shave butter,
which goes on clear,
delivered to your door
for less than what you'd pay
to have to actually get off your own butt,
drive to the store,
fight with someone to open up the security cage,
and buy razor blades there.
It's ridiculous!
And for a limited time,
new members can get their first month
of the executive razor
with a tube of Dr. Carter's razor
for only five bucks
with free shipping.
And after that,
your razors are just a few bucks a month.
So it's a $15 value
for just five bucks.
And don't forget
that Dollar Shave Club offers more
than just razors.
Along with shave butter,
they have an awesome selection
of high-quality grooming products
from hairstyling to shower products
that you can get
just like their razors
delivered to your door.
So get your first month
for just five bucks
at dollarshaveclub.com
slash Linus.
That's dollarshaveclub.com
slash Linus.
So thanks to D-Wave for hosting us here.
Thanks to you guys for watching.
If you disliked this video,
you know where that button is.
But if you liked it,
hit the like button,
get subscribed,
and maybe check out
where to buy the stuff we featured
at the link in the video description.
Okay, less applicable for this video than usual,
but we also have links down there
to our merch store,
which has cool shirts like this one,
and our community forum,
which you should totally join.