ASME Bluegrass Section: Solace of Quantum

Description

Please join us for a fascinating and timely program sponsored by the Bluegrass Section of the ASME on July 14th, 2022. We will meet at Sutton's Restaurant (110 North Locust Hill Dr., Lexington, KY 40509) beginning at 5:30 with dinner and drinks available off the menu. The presentation, titled "Solace of Quantum" will begin around 6:15 and will feature Dr. Hank Dietz, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Kentucky. Here's an abstract for his talk: We live in what appears to be the end days of Moore's Law. His 1965 prediction that the amount of circuitry one could cost-effectively place on a chip would exponentially double roughly every two years meant that computers could become faster primarily by parallel processing: performing many operations simultaneously. Unfortunately, now that rate seems to have slowed and we also are suffering from the fact that power consumption per unit circuitry has not dropped as fast as circuit complexity has grown. What we need is a way to continue to increase parallelism without correspondingly increasing the amount of circuitry needed and power consumed. Quantum computing has the potential to provide a very restrictive, but massively parallel, form of computation in which an exponential amount of parallel computation is supported per unit hardware and power consumption. This talk will focus mostly on how quantum computing works as a computational model: how are they are programmed and what they can -- and cannot -- do. The current state of the art in quantum computing, and what the future might bring, will be discussed.