Iran Admits Its Quantum Computer Had Zero Quantum in It

News
By Francisco Pires
published

The quantum equivalent to shooting your own feet.

Quantum computing ceremony
(Image credit: Tasnim News)

A few weeks ago, Iran broke through worldwide media due to its announcement that the country had successfully developed and deployed quantum computing products to aid in its military operations. But even as Iran's Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari smiled at the cameras present in the announcement, the tech world was quick to notice that the gold-plaqued board being showcased as an example of the country's work on quantum computing was nothing more than an Amazon-available, ARM-based FPGA (Field-Programable Gate Array) development board.

It seems Iran took a bit longer than one would expect to actually run the numbers on its "quantum computing product." Only recently, the country issued an official withdrawal statement admitting that there was no quantum at all to its quantum announcement.

"The unveiling of the FPGA board in the said conference has conveyed this false mentality to the country's media space that the said board is a quantum processor, which was not the case," said the research vice chancellor for Imam Khomeini University (machine translation via Tasnim News). Note that the issue isn't with the announcement itself and how it was worded. Apparently, the issue was with the country's media.

Even so, the research vice chancellor insisted that Iran is indeed looking into quantum computing as an aid for its armed forces' missions, adding that "the principle of the problem of the proposed algorithm, dealing with the disturbance of surface vessels' positioning systems, is important and approved for the promotion of maritime security."

To be fair, FPGAs can be (and often are) paired with quantum computing elements - they're usually deployed in quantum control mechanisms, bridging the gap between standard computing (like the one that's powering your current reading experience) and quantum computing (and if you're reading this in a quantum computer, do make sure to leave us a note). 

So the ARM development board could, perhaps, have been truly used for quantum computing research at some point. Even so, there's a difference between treading the quantum waters with an FPGA dev board and actually manufacturing and deploying devices such as Intel's own Tunnel Falls Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) or IBM's Quantum System One. But Iran's leadership apparently thought it best to reap the (now meagre and questionable) geopolitical rewards of throwing its hat onto the quantum computing ring.

That might've been a bad move - but only Iran's leadership knows for sure.

Francisco Pires
Francisco Pires
Freelance News Writer

Francisco Pires is a freelance news writer for Tom's Hardware with a soft side for quantum computing.

14 Comments Comment from the forums
  • MiniITXEconomy
    Quantum computing, Amazon third-party PCB - in the end, none of it mattered more than the friends we made along the way.
    Reply
  • tennis2
    "Our media sucks, that's why this was a false announcement"

    Then the Iranian gvt spent an awful lot of money showboating it's purchase of a raspberry Pi...... gold plaques and everything.
    Reply
  • Metal Messiah.
    I knew the initial claims IRAN made were absurd and baseless. HOWEVER, deep down, somehow, there might be some truth to it, "Because since quantum computers are inherently parallel, FPGAs can make a good fit for small-scale quantum simulations".

    So that means emulating qubits in a FPGA fabric is feasible ? YES. Turns out, this CAN be true to some extent, at least technically. But was Iran showcasing this ? Hello NO.

    But anyway, for this we need to go back in history. So since, it is a known that classical computers are slow at running quantum computing algorithms, FPGAs on the other hand, could have a chance at qubit simulation, for improving performance.

    This was already demonstrated in a paper, dated 2004, by A. U. Khalid. Here's the link:

    https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1347938
    The PDF version of the Master Thesis can be downloaded here. Luckily I also had this on my backup drive, lol: :rolleyes:

    https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/downloads/6m311p64r.pdf
    And the next submission if I can recall correctly, was an FPGA-based real quantum computer emulator paper/thesis, by Jakub Pilch.

    https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10825-018-1287-5
    In the above paper by Pilch, emphasis was given on shifting the processing from time to space, by using slow sequential CPU processing to hardware complexity, and FPGA's fabric parallelism which could have been configured. But at what cost or compromise ?

    Turns out, the tradeoff between time-space was limited to two qubits, since FPGAs have a limited number of cells. So that would be four states. So by filling up the entire FPGA, they were essentially able to implement a two-bit quantum XOR. So much ado for real-world military field applications ? Basically, not.

    In the previous paper by Khalid, they took a more parallel approach, and the concept was to allow for nine simulated qubits on the same FPGA, but this was far slower and impractical. Conclusion based on both these papers, showed that the tradeoff between speed and FPGA fabric space was quite large or aggressive, so any FPGA simulation has to be either "very small" or "very slow".

    Take your pick by choosing just one between these two ! :) That's why Google recommends renting a bunch of GPUs instead, for practical simulations.

    https://quantumai.google/qsim/choose_hw
    So in the end, classical simulations will always come up short, because we are looking for parallelism and speed in a real quantum computer. So the previous Iranian claims were completely off track. Glad it halted !

    I still can't and won't overlook "FPGA-based qubit simulation" though.

    Reply
  • derekullo
    Iran shouldn't be so hard on themselves!
    Everything has a little quantum in it ... just not their processors :P
    Reply
  • LolaGT
    I had a quantum fishing reel once.

    Turns out it had as much quantum in it as Iran's not any quantum contraption
    Reply
  • peachpuff
    MiniITXEconomy said:
    Quantum computing, Amazon third-party PCB - in the end, none of it mattered more than the friends we made along the way.
    Russia must have been impressed by that quantum computer, they'll integrate it into their t14 armata...
    Reply
  • TerryLaze
    LolaGT said:
    I had a quantum fishing reel once.

    Turns out it had as much quantum in it as Iran's not any quantum contraption
    I once caught a quantum...
    Ba dum tish...
    Reply
  • Metal Messiah.
    Turns out to be a miscommunication between the PR and one of the media outlets. Just wondering what took Iran so LONG to debunk this news.
    Reply
  • TechyIT223
    Well at least it's good they admitted though. Better late than never.

    I have seen fpgas utilized for similar purposes including simulations. the board might be cheap but can function in lot of ways. Definitely not similar to quantum computing
    Reply
  • TechyIT223
    Metal Messiah. said:
    I knew the initial claims IRAN made were absurd and baseless. HOWEVER, deep down, somehow, there might be some truth to it, "Because since quantum computers are inherently parallel, FPGAs can make a good fit for small-scale quantum simulations".

    So that means emulating qubits in a FPGA fabric is feasible ? YES. Turns out, this CAN be true to some extent, at least technically. But was Iran showcasing this ? Hello NO.

    But anyway, for this we need to go back in history. So since, it is a known that classical computers are slow at running quantum computing algorithms, FPGAs on the other hand, could have a chance at qubit simulation, for improving performance.

    This was already demonstrated in a paper, dated 2004, by A. U. Khalid. Here's the link:

    https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/1347938
    The PDF version of the Master Thesis can be downloaded here. Luckily I also had this on my backup drive, lol: :rolleyes:

    https://escholarship.mcgill.ca/downloads/6m311p64r.pdf
    And the next submission if I can recall correctly, was an FPGA-based real quantum computer emulator paper/thesis, by Jakub Pilch.

    https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10825-018-1287-5
    In the above paper by Pilch, emphasis was given on shifting the processing from time to space, by using slow sequential CPU processing to hardware complexity, and FPGA's fabric parallelism which could have been configured. But at what cost or compromise ?

    Turns out, the tradeoff between time-space was limited to two qubits, since FPGAs have a limited number of cells. So that would be four states. So by filling up the entire FPGA, they were essentially able to implement a two-bit quantum XOR. So much ado for real-world military field applications ? Basically, not.

    In the previous paper by Khalid, they took a more parallel approach, and the concept was to allow for nine simulated qubits on the same FPGA, but this was far slower and impractical. Conclusion based on both these papers, showed that the tradeoff between speed and FPGA fabric space was quite large or aggressive, so any FPGA simulation has to be either "very small" or "very slow".

    Take your pick by choosing just one between these two ! :) That's why Google recommends renting a bunch of GPUs instead, for practical simulations.

    https://quantumai.google/qsim/choose_hw
    So in the end, classical simulations will always come up short, because we are looking for parallelism and speed in a real quantum computer. So the previous Iranian claims were completely off track. Glad it halted !

    I still can't and won't overlook "FPGA-based qubit simulation" though.

    Pretty excellent 👌 observation. U nailed the fpga's simulations part. Respect.
    Reply