Surfing the Singularity : Super Grover!
Hello and happy holidays to all. In this blog installment I'll report back from SuperComputing 2024, offer up a programmer-friendly view of the quantum computing space with a code tour of Grover's algorithm, and share some of my own thoughts on using the latest crop of AI programmer assistant tools.
It was a pleasant SC24 high performance computing (HPC) conference in November. Having attended in past either in-person (Atlanta this year) or virtual, this year I chose virtual again. The big loss was being unable to troll the enormous vendor hall, but otherwise, webcasts make it much easier to be in two places at one time or to skim topics of passing interest.[1]
There's a new top HPC machine (that we know of) - El Capitan, and its powered by AMD, containing about a million CPU cores and about 10 million GPU cores.[2] Molecular dynamics papers presented using a GPU-accelerated exascale computer reminds that, quantum aside for a moment, the real work is still being done in the classical world.[3] NVIDIA showcased the growing fusion of AI and HPC with their "superchip" designs - incorporating a CPU and a GPU on the same chip.[4] And why not, the money keeps flowing, the current outgoing federal administration now locking in the CHIPS Act funding before the end of the term.[5]
But beyond the incremental improvements in compute, storage, cooling, power consumption and the like, it seemed to me, through my remote goggles, that the real action was happening on the sidelines of SC24, in the quantum computing space.
Quantum Chip on Shoulder
There's significant skepticism of quantum computing from the HPC community at the moment. Quantum computers today are toys in comparison to HPC, and stakeholders in HPC and classical computing (which would include myself) might wonder aloud "what's the point?" For some applications (like the fluid dynamics apps my company uses), quantum utility is perhaps still a decade away.[7]
But the groundwork is being laid today, and when we understand that there are useful problems which can be solved on quantum computers, and only on quantum computers, we might at least allow the playing to continue. And we might be surprised at how fast quantum computing is progressing, and also just churning. Even those in the industry are hedging their bets - on which qubit technologies and which companies will be the winners - and as such are changing partners on a regular basis [8,9,10], although this sometimes means needing to unproductively reinvent the wheel (how many Python quantum circuit libraries do we need?)[11]
A couple of new announcements from Big Blue caught my eye. First, an early demonstrator of incorporating an IBM quantum computer into an HPC data center, unifying the resource scheduling, was shown at RPI with their AiMOS cluster and their first-in-the-nation academic installation.[12] The second, and more important, was the paper in Nature demonstrating the union of two quantum computers via classical networks, providing another avenue for scaling up hybrid quantum computing.[13]
But today's QPUs are still noisy, fragile, small, expensive, and scarce. Maturity is still a ways off. QPUs are not fungible - to be successful in executing an application on a quantum computer, we must understand the error profile of that specific device! Not just that brand of quantum computer product, but this instance of that product! We need hands-on examples to grow the personal and team experience with quantum while we await stabilized hardware and the productivity-enabling software abstractions which can only come after industry maturity, and these early (head-butting) experiences.
Making Your Quantum Bones
Today's education in and around quantum computing is still focused on the experimental audience. We are still doing experiments about quantum more than experiments with quantum. The educational material which does exist, and there is an increasing amount, is focused on a community which is very comfortable with quantum physics and its associated mathematics. Most people, myself included, do not fit this description. As a computer science graduate, adjunct prof, and software engineer by trade, I want to see higher level programming abstractions, not those centered around qubits and gates which clearly does not scale for large programs. We will be waiting a while. So in the meantime, we need to see some examples using today's technology and syntax but which are more suited for the Comp Sci student audience, to help begin to bridge that gap.
If we visit the Algorithm Zoo [14], a collection of quantum algorithms which show a computational advantage over similar classical approaches, we find some things (but not many) which might look familiar to a CS undergrad, but the implementations, when they exist, are often broken. In this current early phase of the quantum era, vendors are playing free and loose with their SDKs, and releases with significant object model refactorings and breaking changes are the norm.
So I offer here an example of a quantum program which itself likely has a short shelf life. You can find it here.[15, & above] It shows a cooked up example of using Grover's algorithm, which is a quantum algorithm for search in unstructured (e.g. unsorted) data. Classically, "cuz Murphy's Law", you might need to walk the entire dataset to find the item of interest (or show its not there) - we call this an O(n) algorithm. Using Grover's algorithm, you can do the search with a strong probability of success in O(sqrt(n)) time - a quadratic speedup, and one worth pursuing for many applications. Note we are only saying we can perform the search with high probability - this is quantum computing, and everything is a probability. And while the example shown isn't necessarily the most common application of Grover, understanding Grover is worthwhile, as it appears as a sub-procedure in many other quantum algorithms.
Here are a few key points to take away, even if you don't take the time to look at the documented code example:
- We're going to store a small set of strings - binary strings of 1's and 0's representing a small dataset - into a quantum system of qubits.
- Since our strings are chosen to be 16 binary digits long, we will use 16 qubits. This is a large enough number of qubits to show some non-trivial problems, but not so many as to not be runnable on a simulator on your laptop. (The performance does not scale linearly with the number of qubits.)
- A system of n qubits contains 2**n possible states (combinations of 0's and 1's). That's a lot. We will have far fewer state strings in our dataset - just a handful for this experiment.
- After initializing the qubits, we will mark each state in the quantum system which corresponds to a binary string in our dataset. To do this we will use the phase of the qubit, which is an extra useful lever you do not find in classical bits (among other unique quantum advantages).
- Using Grover's algorithm, we will amplify the probability of finding the marked states relative to other background states. I.e., the signal is separated from the noise. To do this we iteratively apply an oracle quantum circuit to the initial system.
- Note that we use the same 16 qubits to encode all of the 16-digit strings in the dataset. Try that with a classical computer!
- We then use Grover's algorithm again using a target string, applying the oracle against the now prepared quantum system, and returning the result that the target either is or is not in the dataset.
Hopefully this gives some flavor of what its like to program a quantum computer using an example most classical programmers today can understand. There are places where the code can potentially be improved - I welcome your input in the comments section below.
AI AI, Oh.
During these quantum coding explorations, during other coding work, and while writing documents (like this one), I've also been experimenting with a sequence of so-called "AI assistants". Starting with Copilot as a plugin for the popular VS Code IDE, I quickly switched to the Codeium plugin which performed better for my purposes, mostly because it took more of my code into context while making suggestions.[17] Since, the various vendors have leap-frogged each other in features and quality of results, and so while this tool comparison may be stale, its also the case that any new comparison would soon itself become stale.
While the VS Code IDE provides hooks for plugins, some vendors, most notably Cursor [18] took the approach that to provide a true AI assistant (AIA) for a modern software developer you needed plugin hooks in many places, and control over things like the rendering of change sets. So they forked the VS Code IDE entirely. And they weren't the only ones to do this - Codeium now also has its own IDE called Windsurf - this is what I'm currently using. This can't be end state for the discussion and more leap-frogging is expected, so watch this space. I've now seen cases where people are putting "Cursor" on their resume - not a good idea to commit to that, but it is a good idea to start using one of these modern tools in your work, and to better understand how to adopt your work practices in light of their potential.
In other words, to experiment while these AIA tools improve. The head of Anthropic, a major AI player and the maker of the model driving my current IDE, is proud to say their model reaches 50% success rates on a popular software engineering metric.[19,20] Do you want to pair program with an assistant which is only right 50% of the time? I can tell you that its got its ups and downs.
On the positive, for mundane tasks, it can do a pretty good job. Questions like "how do you do X in Python?" which you might have previously taken to Stack Overflow can now be answered in the IDE with custom-made code samples. You can turn your question into an instruction:
Me: modify this code to take the target string as a command line argument and default to the current target string if none is provided
AIA: I've modified the code to...
And it will describe in words and code a working solution, albeit in my case one I found to be slightly over-engineered:
Me: use sys to determine if a single arg was provided
AIA: I'll modify the code to use sys.argv for a simpler command line argument handling...
In another interaction, we debated if an AIA-proposed solution was mathematically efficient, at one point:
AIA: Would you like me to: 1) Implement a simpler but less efficient version that demonstrates the concept? 2) Or explore how to properly implement the quantum multiplexing needed for efficient database loading?
Me: yes, but make it in a new file
And it did. The main reason for asking for a new file rather than change in place was that the AIA is still often wrong! And reviewing a large amount of inline change is hard for the human eye and mind.
Me: but now your proposed solution doesn't load the database or even look at it!
AIA: Ah, you're absolutely right again!
And it then goes on to suggest further changes, which you might wonder why those changes weren't proposed in the first place? Keep in mind, its only (proudly) right 50% of the time. It is, as we say, "generative AI" after all - it doesn't so much "hallucinate" - it is designed to make s***... I mean, "stuff" up. (The idea that this GPT-based technology such as it is would be even capable of producing generalized AI (AGI) is an open question, indeed.)
But these tools can still be useful, not just for single-line "tab" completions, but now as we see here, in higher level conversations with the programmer. It can help articulate requirements, and write test cases, and help drive CI/CD pipelines. And it will improve in scope and accuracy, and custom AIA models tuned for specific programming domains (e.g. quantum) already exist.[21]
This is truly the death and rebirth of computer programming, as we have come to experience it. In 1975, IBM's Fred Brooks published the seminal book "The Mythical Man-Month" which described, among other things, the software team which one would want to wrap around a senior technical engineer - a team of as many as 10 specialized professionals to handle the documentation, testing, business communications, and more common technical tasks so your senior contributor ("the surgeon") can focus on great ideas and great architecture.[22] But however, in today's DevOps culture, where we expect our senior engineers to be "full stack", to do it all, to play all roles, the AI tooling brings back some sanity and reminds that there are tasks best left delegated.
2025
It's that time in the calendar when everyone offers up their forecasts for the coming year. I'll not wade into that. My only prediction is this - that in 2025, the rate of change in key emerging and difficult to humanly understand (nearly black-box) technologies like AI and quantum computing will continue to accelerate, in many cases, beyond our ability to comprehend or predict. This is the so-called singularity, and it's evolving and emerging during a period also marked by political, military, and economic upheaval.
Surf's up. Happy New Year.
- andy (linkedin: andygallojr)
References
[0] Photo by Ben Wicks on Unsplash
[1] SC24 schedule: https://sc24.conference-program.com/
[2] El Capitan hardware overview: https://hpc.llnl.gov/documentation/user-guides/using-el-capitan-systems/hardware-overview
[3] "Breaking the Million-Electron and 1 EFLOP/s Barriers: Biomolecular-Scale Ab Initio Molecular Dynamics Using MP2 Potentials", https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1109/SC41406.2024.00015
[4] NVIDIA SC24 superchip press release: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/nvidia-announces-new-gb200-nvl4-superchip-at-sc24-but-says-theres-still-value-to-be-found-in-grace-hopper/
[5] Tracking CHIPS Act funding: https://www.semiconductors.org/chips-incentives-awards/
[6] NVIDIA Grace Hopper architecture: https://developer-blogs.nvidia.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/grace-hopper-overview.png
[7] "Exploring quantum use cases for the aerospace industry", IBM white paper, https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/en-us/report/quantum-aerospace
[8] IonQ with NVIDIA SC24 press release: https://ionq.com/news/ionq-to-advance-hybrid-quantum-computing-with-new-chemistry-application-and
[9] Microsoft and Atom quantum press releease: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/quantum/2024/11/19/microsoft-and-atom-computing-offer-a-commercial-quantum-machine-with-the-largest-number-of-entangled-logical-qubits-on-record/
[10] Alice & Bob logical qubit lib press release : https://alice-bob.com/newsroom/logical-qubit-emulator-felis-quantum-cloud-alice-bob/
[11] Quantinuum stack press release: https://www.quantinuum.com/blog/announcing-the-launch-of-quantinuum-nexus-our-all-in-one-quantum-computing-platform
[12] RPI's experiments with HPC and quantum co-scheduling: https://www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/supercomputing-24
[13] "Combining quantum processors with real-time classical communication", Nature, Nov 2024, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-08178-2
[14] Algorithm Zoo: https://quantumalgorithmzoo.org/
[15] Pattern match example code: https://github.com/agallojr/research-notes/blob/02253900f33d784402f0cd0b3ed4d9d360544605/quantum/src/qiskit/pattern_match.py
[16] "QC — Grover’s algorithm", J. Hui, https://jonathan-hui.medium.com/qc-grovers-algorithm-cd81e61cf248
[17] Codeium Windsurf IDE: https://codeium.com/windsurf
[18] Cursor IDE: https://www.cursor.com/
[19] Dario Amodei, CEO Anthropic, on Lex Fridman podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugvHCXCOmm4&t=20s&pp=ygULbGV4IGZyaWRtYW4%3D
[20] SWE-bench: https://www.swebench.com/
[21] IBM Qiskit Code Assistant: https://www.ibm.com/quantum/blog/qiskit-code-assistant
[22] "The Mythical Man-Month", Fred Brooks, 1975: https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~weimerw/2018-481/readings/mythical-man-month.pdf