First release of quantum operating system, Deltaflow | Hacker News Reader

First release of quantum operating system, Deltaflow

riverlane.com

39 pointskristianpaul43 comments

Interesting. Very early, but somebody has to be.

Good luck to them; seems a qualified team looking at the About section.

Documentation note (at the risk of downvotes :) ): unless they are intending to mark their product as different, or are not talking about programs as we think of them (in which case clarification might be useful), "programme" should be "program". It's not a British vs American thing, that's how it's spelled in the UK in the software industry too.

It is a British v. American thing.

As with many common spelling differences across the Pond (like -or v. -our, and -er v. -re ), the US spelling is the original, and the current British spelling is a later Francophile affectation, from a conveniently forgotten time long ago (18-19th C), when the British admired and copied French culture.

It is usually computer program in British English due to US influence on modern British spelling in areas of technology, perhaps perpetuated by the tendency of hackers to prefer terse names. You continue to see TV programme and concert programme in British English.

As in many things, the British prefer the principle of pragmatic de facto bottom-up evolution, based on common sense and common usage. So the OED was famously compiled by collecting fragments of real language use. Language pedants in Britain are usually ridiculed, in a similar way to those who fancy themselves as public intellectuals.

Compare this with the French tendency towards dictatorial de jure top-down control, as shown by the Académie Française's specification of correct French. The rest of Europe is similar, see Royal Spanish Academy, Council for German Orthography, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators

France also has a thriving industry of respected public intellectuals.

Another example is the British Common Law system based on precedents in case law, compared to strict prescriptive Napoleonic Codes. Britain has no written constitution and no National Day - the Queen's Birthday is celebrated, but it's not a public holiday. Even the name and boundaries are fluid, as the full abbreviation UKGB&NI attests.

That's an interesting and informative comment, but in the strict sense of how "program" is spelt in the UK in the intended meaning here, ultimately just background information.

The American origin (which I'm well aware of) has long been the standard spelling in the software industry in the UK.

The spelling in the document - insofar as computer programs are intended by "programme" - is awkward at best and wrong at worst - even in the UK - and that isn't going to do them any favours in flagship documentation.

It's probably just an unfortunate oversight after a spelling checker automatically corrected the text to local spelling without context, or a (fair) assumption was made by the author if they are new to software terminology in this case.

Or maybe they are really clever and are intentionally misspelling it on the assumption their target audience are high flying execs, journalists and money raisers who are also unaware...

Kudos to them, I applaud any initiative in the quantum computing space. That said I feel companies like Riverlane or Q-CTRL are way too early in the market. There are still so many open questions regarding which architecture and technology is best suited for quantum computing, and there isn't yet a single practically relevant problem that can be solved on a NISQ quantum computer (to my knowledge). Building a software company on such a shifting hardware landscape is quite bold. Having built several technology companies with novel, albeit much less cutting-edge technologies I would be very wary getting in so early into a field that's barely starting to get commercialized. But again, kudos to them for being so early in the game, I hope it'll work out for them.

I’m of a similar opinion, but with the note that QCTRL actually makes products that people want. The current state of the art in QC requires that pretty much everyone needs some kind of pulse shaping/noise reduction, which is (some of?) what QCTRL provides. Plus the quantum sensing space benefits greatly from such techniques as well. So even if quantum computing falls into a “quantum winter” it’s likely that quantum sensing will pull through and so QCTRL might survive.

Those other software companies are also competing with the IBMs, Googles, and Rigettis that are also building similar software for the the hardware they’re making.

To me it feels like these companies are trying to sell Kubernetes to a community that has not yet invented the vacuum tube (and might never manage to).

Bravo!!! Apt analogy :)

I feel this starts from a very wrong assumption.

There is the idea floating around that in the future we'll just replace classical computers with quantum computers. But even if we skip the challenges of actually doing that, what would be the point?

From what we know today quantum copmuters aren't magical computers that make everything faster. Instead there are a couple of very special problems that QCs can calculate much faster.

If you keep that in mind it's clear where QCs job is: As specialized equipment doing calculations for very particular problems, e.g. for scientific use.

That also means noone will likely ever need a quantum operating system. We'll just continue using "normal" operating systems that interact with specialized hardware for specialized calculations.

This is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but predictions are notoriously hard to do.

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

"The Americans have need of the telephone, but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys." -- Sir William Preece, chief engineer of the British Post Office, 1876.

"Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" -- H. M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927

I don't see how pointing out incorrect predictions from the past is constructive or helps address the question. In the same line of thought you could have collected a list of correct skeptical predictions and listed a bunch of technologies that haven't worked out.

And what is the question here exactly? OC points out a couple of assumptions that are made (I agree for instance that I don’t see the QM replace classical computers anytime soon)

But then also makes a few assumptions that might prove to be true or not. That is to say : we don’t know.

The people who I quote in the past also had a delineated idea of what the future might entail, but it’s impossible to look very far ahead.

You are argumenting with a fallacy.

The OP argumentation might be incomplete, but is at least solid argument for why we won't need a quantum operating system.

If you believe there is or could be a need for a quantum operating system, _explain why_. If you don't know, that's ok.

But arguing that "The OP argument cannot be correct because other people made incorrect predictions about other stuff in the past" is pointless and useless.

Maybe some application of quantum computing appears in the future that requires a quantum operating system, or maybe there is one such application that already exists today and we don't know about. I don't know of any, and like the OP I also think of Quantum Computers as "accelerators" (like GPUs, FPGAs, Xeon Phis, ...) for certain class of problems.

I guess I am looking at it from a different angle, in which case, and following your reasoning, you are indeed correct and I misconstrued OCs intention/message.

Fundamentally, I disagree. The person you are conversing with is applying a sort of Bayesian prior to the reasoning about quantum computers. I think this is actually a very wise thing to do.

- they're specifically picking a prior made of only the skeptical predictions of famous people about some technology that turned out to be wrong.

- they aren't updating the prior with new information, they're just pointing it out as sufficient on its own

Using the two points above anyone can make a bad argument about anything - just pick the data points that fit your narrative, state that narrative as a conclusion and don't update it when presented with other facts.

> I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." -- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.

This quote always rubs me wrong, because the problem is that we’ve changed definition of what a computer is.

If you come to think about it, what he was referring to is what we would now call cloud infrastructure, and there’s not really that much more than 5 of those...

Yep, and that works for cloud infrastructure. But we also have mobile/IoT ...

Question for those with active imagination: how would quantum computing change Human Computer Interaction? If it doesn't then a kernel driver module for the quantum computing hardware chip would suffice.

Ooo fun. Okay.. really stretching here..

Lets say decoherence is no longer an issue. You've got your qbits suspended in some sort of fancy diamond lattice, and for some reason you really want your scheduler and all your hardware IO to be running via quantum algorithms. So you've got your fusion core crystal loaded into your compute crystal, and you really just want to eliminate any need for silicon at all.

So now we're talking about a self contained smart-diamond, probabally embedded into a human forehead. It pretty much sits around doing its own thing, observing the world around it and computing out all possible fates of everything it sees, and every once in a while your tiny little monkey brain can reach out and ask it dumb questions like "Hey, how much of my life savings should I dump into some random new cryptocurrency??" and it will be obliged to look into it momentarily and respond accordingly.

OK, but let's paint a picture and see where it goes:

QC's become several orders of magnitude better at a few very specific calculations.

We work out to frame some set of algorithms that are currently slow on conventional computers so that they're fast on QC's.

Some genius works out how to frame some currently-obscure method of (for example) AI research into the new subset of QC-friendly algorithms.

Some other geniuses work out how to train this new breed of fast AIs how to interact with users in a meaningful way.

The next mobile revolution happens, everyone carries an AI in their pocket, the Culture looms nearer :)

My point being that if we make the hardware faster, we'll find an application for it. No-one could have predicted that the humble graphics card (solely intended to make the specific vector calculations of 3d gaming faster) would power a financial speculation industry worth trillions of dollars. Make it fast and some genius will work out how to make it useful.

Or a genius could discover some killer application for one of 1000 different competing technologies that are not quantum computing but replace current technology instead. This giant ramp up of something that is still long-term high-risk is kind of strange to watch. Surely all that funding would be better spent doing fundamental research on hardware, rather than developing the IT layers. I guess at least the stupid software patents will expire sooner once it finally becomes real.

I lived in University accomodation with a researcher who was working on transistors for optical computers, and predicted them taking over from silicon in "10 years, tops". That was in 1989.

The relationship between funding and hype is always weird. But it must be really hard having to decide which of several projects to fund, and "what people are talking about" is obviously one of the metrics.

I imagine that a quantum computing device will eventually be similar to a GPU now - plugs in to a CPU, does what it needs to wherever its strength lay, and over the course of time we will find more and more uses for it (or entirely new fields like bitcoin).

I am fairly certain that there are already OS's designed to run entirely on a GPU rig.

> I am fairly certain that there are already OS's designed to run entirely on a GPU rig.

A "GPU OS" would still run on a CPU, it's mostly about feeding tasks to the GPU efficiently. The design goals between CPUs and GPUs are strikingly different; CPUs are much more designed for conditionals and branching while GPUs do massively parallelized number crunching. The CPU is the robot arm that picks and shovels things into the GPU pipeline.

My understanding is that quantum computers are very similar to GPUs in this regard, and I don't think a classical "OS" makes sense to directly run on either.

(P.S.: even more so, I'd expect QCs to model similar to FPGA accelerator cards)

I second this. Something like a quantum computers will, at least for most computing applications and consumer market, be something that is a peripheral to your "classical" computer just like FPGAs or GPUs today.

I would like to think that in 10 years I'll be buying a used 64-qubit card on Ebay, like a 2GB video card. What will be the equivalent to gaming which drives this tech to ever-higher performance? DIY protein folding life hacking?

Plus QPU is a nice little name we could use for it

Imo deep learning would be a better example, Bitcoin is no better because of GPUs (nor is it mined on then anymore)

> From what we know today quantum copmuters aren't magical computers that make everything faster. Instead there are a couple of very special problems that QCs can calculate much faster.

More details: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3

While I'm not discounting your assumption about limited quantum use cases for now, I'm going to suggest that when we think hard about a problem - we as humans usually don't see the true potentials of a technology. We usually assume we understand, but depth of understanding doesn't come until hands on experience, depth of knowledge increase.

I'm guessing we will find significant uses cases to replace classical computers.

While not impossible, I would say that it would require a significant change in our understanding of quantum computation. That is, everything we know so far about quantum computing suggests it is only useful in certain complex use cases, and even then, with much help from a classical computer - we don't know any quantum algorithm that could be computed entirely on a quantum computer, they all have classical parts.

Isn't this the same argument people were making about those huge mainframes 50 or so years ago? If there's one thing we can all agree on is that we don't really know the implications of a new technology in the long run.

It doesn't seem to me like the point of this is to "replace" classical computers, but to consolidate the tools people need to interact with a variety of quantum computing technologies:

> We have a grand vision: an operating system that makes quantum software portable across qubit technologies; that is scalable to millions of qubits; and, that teases the highest possible performance out of every qubit – even for applications like error correction that need fast feedback loops. Deltaflow-on-ARTIQ is our first step towards achieving this vision.

This isn't an OS in the Windows sense of the term; this is LabVIEW for Quantum, and is sorely needed.

something like a Quantum Co-processor for accelerating quantum algorithms would likely be the next step, instead of standalone 'quantum-centric' processors with their specific code and protocols.

Interesting. Very early, but somebody has to be.

Good luck to them; seems a good team looking at the About section.

Minor documentation note (at the risk of downvotes :) ): unless they are intending to mark their product as different, or are not talking about programs as we think of them (in which case clarification might be useful), "programme" should be "program". It's not a British vs American thing, that's how it's spelled in the UK in industry too.

Who is the target audience for this, I don't imagine it's end users like me. Is it research companies, academics?

I imagine you'd also need access to qubit based hardware, which isn't commercially available. Where do you source those from?

Crypto startups. Just imagine the financing possibilities of Deep Learning Blockchain based Quantum powered Contract Network.

Congratulations! According to the Buzzword Bingo, you’re on the path to funding!

I wonder what prompts people to use such fonts on their websites

How do we measure the development of production quantum computing and it's effect on cracking hash algorithms and other cryptography? Is this even a valid concern?

We're probably decades away from Shor's algorithm. Right now we're mostly dealing in the realm of "Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum" machines (NISQ). The abstract of this paper gives a good summary of where we're at: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.00862

The "operating system" has little to do with accelerating that (outside of maybe cutting out some development cost + time), though in theory they can provide some algorithms and optimizations that minimize noise and decoherence.

Some useful context: https://www.riverlane.com/products/

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