If you’ve ever developed an application; commercial, enterprise or personal, you’ve probably had the often-cumbersome issue of performance weighing heavily in the back of your mind. How many variables do I have? When should I instantiate this object. How often will this method be called? Is this loop too complex? These are just some of the overwhelming number of questions we ask ourselves as developers with every programming decision we make.
There are a number of reasons we have these questions. The first, and most obvious, is we don’t want to create an application that responds too slow or “freezes”. The terms “Spinning Wheel” and “Blue Screen of Death” have become commonplace in the industry due to the fact that they are so often experienced and, likewise, so despised. Other, not so well known, reasons include implementing critical, time-based functionality like scheduled emails or daily uploads. In processes like these, when one process lags or does’t complete in a timely manor other processes completely fail. Additionally, interesting things happen when more than one process compete for time slots in the process lineup. Race condition errors are random, sporadic and inconsistent errors that occur when different methods or functions compete for the same artifact and, as a result, often receive it in different states. These errors are both confusing and very time consuming to resolve. If only machines could move fast enough to support our far superior mental capacity.
As discusses in my earlier post, there is a solution and we have a slight idea how to achieve it. Until now, we can only achieve quantum processing at very small levels. The complexity of achieving two states at the same time is just too much for materials we’re currently aware of to handle… until now. A team of scientists at Purdue University led by associate professor of physics and astronomy and electrical and computer engineering, Yong P. Chen are experimenting with new materials called “topological insulators”. Their research thus far has yielded some amazing results which have incited the team to refer to this material as the “smoking gun” in the effort to find materials capable of facilitating quantum processing.
Since discovering the benefits of using topological insulators, research teams have allocated resources towards identifying the best material for producing these insulators. These efforts have received great attention and support from groups including Harvard, The Welch Foundation, the U.S. Army and other organizations. With continued support, a reliable element will be realized resulting in reliable, fault-tolerant processing which could make development practices more efficient and make those performance-based headaches a thing of the past.
Venere, Emil (2014). ‘Topological insulators’ promising for spintronics, quantum computers. Science Daily, Retrieved from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141113195156.htm
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