Quantum Computing Could Head to ‘the Cloud’
The search for the perfect alliance between science and technology has married quantum computing to the future of IT – the cloud. Researchers have used quantum mechanics to encrypt heavy-duty number-crunching computing, thereby removing a major obstacle in the adoption of the cloud for many enterprises – how safe is my data when it’s hosted on someone else’s computers? Their experiment envisions the data processing servers as a quantum computer, and the eggheads have succeeded in hiding the input, data processing and output of a computation from any possible snooping.
Quantum computers use the ability of quantum particles to be in more than one state at the same time to rapidly check lots and lots of possible solutions to a problem, thus ramping up their processing power.