Quantum information and quantum computation

Like many new ideas in science, it wasnвЂ™t accepted without some pushback. Fermilab was one of the first national labs to try the concept of clustering these smaller computers together, treating each particle collision as a computationally independent event that could be analyzed on its own processor. Thanks to IntelвЂ™s 1971 development of a new commercially available microprocessor the size of a domino, computers were shrinking. Instead of simply buying more large computers (which were incredibly expensive), the committee suggested a new approach: They recommended increasing computational power by distributing the burden over clusters or вЂњfarmsвЂќ of hundreds of smaller computers. In December of 1983, a committee of physicists and computer scientists released a 103-page report highlighting the вЂњurgent need for an upgrading of the laboratoryвЂ™s computer facilities.вЂќ The report said the lab вЂњshould continue the process of catching upвЂќ in terms of computing ability, and that вЂњthis should remain the laboratoryвЂ™s top computing priority for the next few years.вЂќ Called the Collider Detector at Fermilab and the DZero detector, these new experiments threatened to overpower the labвЂ™s computational abilities. By the mid-1990s, two four-story particle detectors would begin selecting, storing and analyzing data from millions of particle collisions at the Tevatron per second. Then came the completion of the Tevatron-at the time, the worldвЂ™s highest-energy particle accelerator-which would provide the particle beams for numerous experiments at the lab. Over the next five years, Fermilab added five more large mainframe computers to its collection. Called the CDC 6600, it weighed about 6 tons. In 1973, scientists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois got their first big mainframe computer: a 7-year-old hand-me-down from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Illustration by Sandbox Studio, Chicago with Ariel Davis Managing an onslaught of data As computing has grown increasingly more sophisticated, its own progress has enabled new scientific discoveries and breakthroughs. Computing plays an essential role in particle physics and astrophysics as well. They have encouraged the development of new technologies to handle tasks from dealing with avalanches of data to simulating interactions on the scales of both the cosmos and the quantum realm.Д«ut this influence doesnвЂ™t just go one way. The incredible computational demands of particle physics and astrophysics experiments have consistently pushed the boundaries of what is possible. The transistor-the switch that controls the flow of electrical signal within a computer-was invented by a group of physicists at Bell Labs. Physics has played an important role in the history of computing. To deal with this, they developed some of the worldвЂ™s earliest electronic computers. Over time, their calculations became too complex to fit on a blackboard-or to farm out to armies of human вЂњcomputersвЂќ doing calculations by hand. In the mid-twentieth century, particle physicists were peering deeper into the history and makeup of the universe than ever before.

Quantum information and quantum computation