Quantum Computers Vs Supercomputers: What is the Difference?
Quantum Computers Vs Supercomputers, both are incredibly powerful and have mass potential
Over the previous few decades, computing has advanced tremendously far. A technological revolution is currently underway, with machines getting more sophisticated every year. The supercomputer and the quantum computer, two particularly cutting-edge innovations, have a huge range of possible uses. What distinguishes a supercomputer from a quantum computer, and which is superior?
Supercomputers and quantum computers are potent tools for handling difficult calculations, problem-solving, and data analysis. Although they both have the potential to transform computing technology, their speeds and capacities differ greatly.
Supercomputers quickly process massive volumes of data to provide a single result using a conventional computing strategy with numerous processors. These computers are the most powerful in terms of raw computing speed, but they can only do one task at a time, and Moore's Law places a cap on how much data they can process (the principle that computer processor speeds double every two years).
Quantum computers, on the other hand, utilize laws of quantum mechanics to process information in ways that regular computers cannot, resulting in vastly higher processing speeds. They can manage several activities at once and take on challenging issues that would take supercomputer months to resolve. Yet, because of their great sensitivity to temperature fluctuations and need for isolation from outside influences, quantum computers require more upkeep than their conventional equivalents.
Do not ponder who would prevail in a quantum computer vs supercomputer fight. You should consider how those two could combine to form a single supreme computing unit.
What is a Supercomputer?
The father of the Supercomputer is American electrical engineer Seymour Cray, who — beginning in the late 1950s - designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades. A supercomputer is, by definition, a computer that performs at its highest level when compared to a general-purpose computer.
Supercomputers can now do a wide range of important activities, including modeling the Big Bang and forecasting the weather, both of which need large amounts of computation and data.
What computer should we use in the quantum computer vs. supercomputer comparison then? The Frontier, or OLCF-5, will be the first exascale supercomputer in operation by the year 2022. The Frontier, which is housed at the Tennessee-based Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, can produce 1.102 exaFLOPS of Rmax.
What is a Quantum Computer?
On the other hand, a quantum computer is a device that performs computations using superposition, interference, and entanglement, all of which are fundamental states of quantum mechanics. The phrase was first used in a paper written by British physicist David Deutsch in 1985, but the idea may have originated as early as 1981 when the late Richard Feynman asked the question: Can we simulate physics on a computer? at a conference on physics and computation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
There is a lot of misunderstanding about what quantum computers can truly perform in public and popular science circles. One clumsy explanation is that they are just faster than supercomputers, but this is incorrect.
Even though we are now in the noisy intermediate scale, or NISQ, age of computing, quantum computers and quantum-inspired algorithms have the potential to be helpful for combinatorial problems like anticipating traffic patterns as well as concerns with cybersecurity and cryptography.
However, several factors will need to change with the technology to truly see quantum computers move away from the NISQ era and towards "quantum advantage," where better results in verticals like drug design, computational chemistry, financial modeling, and weather forecasting are predicted. These include, but are not limited to, the number of logical qubits within the system, drastically reduced decoherence times, and enhanced error correction.
The 127-qubit IBM quantum computer and Eagle processor were unveiled to the public in 2021. The Eagle is by far the most potent quantum computer in existence, and it is twice as big as machines created by Google and the University of Science and Technology of China.
The Frontier supercomputer will be able to do two quintillion calculations per second by May 2022. Meanwhile, according to IBM Research, the 127-qubit Eagle processor from IBM can perform up to 2,400 circuit layer operations per second on the Falcon r5 processor and has a quantum volume of up to 128 on the Falcon r4 and r5 processors. We can't infer much from this, but a 30-qubit system could perform trillions of floating-point operations every second.
It is safe to say, however, that a supercomputer will have a significant computational advantage as of 2022, at least for anything that is commercially useful.
Quantum Computer Vs Supercomputer
Supercomputers cannot compare to the speed and power of quantum computers. Because they can handle several computations at once, they are perfect for handling challenging issues that call for processing enormous amounts of data efficiently. Supercomputers can handle a greater variety of jobs, but they can only handle one at a time.
But, when we explicitly contrast them, it becomes a semantic argument that quantum computers could be referred to as a subset of supercomputers. Similar to supercomputers, quantum computers are anticipated to excel at a single activity rather than displace conventional desktop and laptop computers. They might also require a lot of upkeep and properly supervised data centers.
It's entirely feasible that in the future, we won't even be able to distinguish between quantum and supercomputers anymore. We may simply refer to this market as supercomputing or high-performance computing in a hybrid environment where we combine CPUs, GPUs, AND QPUS to address various components of extremely complicated problems. The outcome of the conflict between the supercomputer and the quantum computer will only be known with time.
