AQUA: Advancing Quantum Architecture
Year-End Newsletter, 2007
Welcome to the inaugural year-end newsletter for the AQUA project!
In April 2007, AQUA advanced from the personal works of Rodney
Van Meter, to a larger, more formal project, as Rod joined the Faculty
of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University Shonan
Fujisawa Campus (SFC), as an Assistant Professor. Rod also joined:
twenty-year-old umbrella organization for much of the
Internet-related research throughout Japan;
Shigechika, Wakikawa, and Van Meter jointly supervise some forty
graduate students working on a broad variety of Internet-related
topics; and
collectively supervise a large group of undergraduates.
Within these organizations, AQUA serves as the framework both for
Rod’s own quantum computer architecture research and for supervising
students interested in all aspects of post-Moore’s Law computer
architectures.
Moore’s Law tells us that, as VLSI technology continues to advance, it
is inevitable that transistors and wires will be built from a
countable number of atoms, and will be ruled by quantum effects and
the Landauer entropy of logical operations. Indeed, the process has
already begun; leakage current, one of the dominant sources of power
consumption in transistors, is a quantum effect. Within the next ten
to fifteen years, we MUST learn how design, build, program, and debug
such systems. AQUA is dedicated to this goal.
AQUA opened in April with two members in addition to Rod: Takahiko
Sato and Shota Nagayama, both sophomores. They began studying from
Kae Nemoto’s introductory book on quantum computing and Feynman’s
Lectures on Computation. By June, they had designed a circuit for a
reversible ternary ripple-carry adder, a small but real research
contribution to the field of quantum computing. They presented their
design as a poster at the Asian Conference on Quantum Information
Science (AQIS), in Kyoto, in September, and we are in the process of
writing it up for journal publication.
When the fall term began, sophomores Takahiro Sunaga and Takafumi Kuno
joined the group. The four students developed a Reversible Lego
Babbage Difference Engine (RLBDE) for display at SFC’s Open Research
Forum (ORF), held at Roppongi Hills in November. The RLBDE is an
excellent vehicle for learning about the levels of reversibility in
computation and its importance, arithmetic algorithms, some important
principles of computer architecture (including clock and information
distribution), and the history of computing. It is also an intriguing
visual attraction, and appeared briefly in Fuji Television’s news
story on ORF.
Agung Trisetyarso, a student in Prof. Kohei Itoh’s group at Keio’s
Yagami Campus, joined the group as an adjunct member, and AQUA’s first
Ph.D. student. He is studying cluster computation, quantum
arithmetic, and topological quantum computation.
Finally, at the end of the year, sophomore Shuya Awano joined the
group; we expect good things from him in 2008.
The pace of Rod’s research was slowed a notch by the transition to a
faculty position and its attendant teaching responsibilities, but
included a number of successes. Papers with Rod as first author were
accepted to IEEE Transactions on Computers and ACM Journal of Emerging
Technologies in Computing Systems, and favorable reviews (but not yet
final acceptance) received on another journal paper. Presentations
include the First International Conference on Quantum Error
Correction, the upcoming Third Workshop on Theory of Quantum
Computation, Communication, and Cryptography, another poster at AQIS,
and a session at ORF on the microscopic world. In addition, Rod
appears as a secondary author on several in-progress papers by
collaborators.
The technical focus remains architectures and tools for distributed
quantum computation. We believe that both laboratory-scale
distributed systems, which we call quantum multicomputers, and
geographically distributed quantum networks will be critical
technologies as we attempt to scale up quantum systems to levels
capable of solving problems of practical commercial interest.
In addition to ongoing collaborations with Prof. Kae Nemoto (NII),
Dr. Bill Munro (HP Labs, Bristol/NII), Dr. Thaddeus Ladd
(NII/Stanford), and Prof. Kohei Itoh, Rod has begun collaborations
with Dr. Austin Fowler (Waterloo), Dr. Jake Taylor (MIT), Liang
Jiang (Harvard), and others. These collaborations are all promising,
due to the diversity of the teams, including theoretical and
experimental physicists, as well as Rod’s background in computer
systems and networking.
Publication of research papers in journals and conferences is
important for crystallizing our understanding of architectural
principles and communicating those results to the research community,
so that they may take advantage of what we learn (and vice-versa!).
However, paper designs are not the ultimate goal. We expect Serial
Number One of a quantum computer to be running in the lab of an
experimental physicist collaborator, but our intention is for the
master architecture to be derived from principles we develop and
designed using our tools, and for Serial Number Two to be running in
the AQUA lab soon afterwards.
The experimental quantum computing community is inherently, and
rightly, conservative about promising to solve extraordinarily
difficult problems on a fixed schedule; the challenges to all quantum
computing technologies are formidable, and there are no guarantees of
success. However, we expect that pull from industry for quantum
computation and related technologies will accelerate within the next
few years, as the end of Moore’s Law becomes more urgent. Our goal is
to be prepared when that pull begins in earnest.
Looking forward, 2008 will be an exciting year. We have many projects
in the works, and ideas for many more. We are actively recruiting
undergrads and graduate students, and hope to be interviewing for
postdocs soon. Recommendations gladly accepted!
Regards, and we hope to see you all in 2008.
Links:
AQUA: http://www.sfc.wide.ad.jp/aqua/index.html
WIDE: http://www.wide.ad.jp/
Rod Van Meter: http://webedit.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~rdv/
Attached are two photos from ORF that have not yet made it to the web
page, and the AQUA logo, a superposition of waves based on Hokusai’s
famous ukiyo-e, The Great Wave Off Kanagawa.
Sincerely,
The AQUA Team
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