IBM's quantum 'puter news proves Big Blue still doesn't get 'cloud' In a troubling development today, IBM demonstrates it still hasn't quite grasped this cloud computing thing at all. Big Blue's boffins have built a quantum-computing processor featuring five superconducting qubits, and installed it in the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in New York. IBM is now inviting people to request access …
R&D really is a marketing function so they should be researching and developing whatever marketing believes the customers will buy. So yes marketing does make the science thing happen.
Sales however is just flogging whatever crap they have: it advances sales droids.
I've only ever once worked for a firm where R&D reported to the head of marketing. It was brilliant: if you had an idea for something you chatted it over with them and if they could see it as something our customers would go for you could be prototyping it next week and getting constructive feedback. It worked the other way too: sometimes they would come to us asking for the impossible and we would send them away educated and sometimes they would ask for something that was quick and easy and would make a massive difference to the firms bottom line.
>Sales however is just flogging whatever crap they have: it advances sales droids.
>I've only ever once worked for a firm where R&D reported to the head of marketing. It was brilliant:
That sounds like a terrible idea. At least in the the smaller shops I have worked, all too often sales will flog shit that doesn't exist yet especially if they are on commission and can pull one last huge quarter and flee before crap hits fan. Second marketing will start promising things to the handful of customers that usually are so big they have the smallish company bent over already (they are usually not profitable customers either but having the name as the customers is worth it to dumb management). A bigger company like my current one is a bit too siloed with people all over the world for that really to be effective more than likely either. I suppose that could maybe work with really good management and good discipline from the different departments but that is pretty rare in my experience.
Ok,
First, yes, IBM's marketeers aka marketdroids aka shit for brains, just don't get it.
IBM's current decade slide is a testament to that.
But beyond this... here's the thing. You have a scarce resource. A quantum computer to play with if you have the right credentials.
So put yourself in IBM's shoes. How do they market this play toy and yet limit access to those who would actually do something of value with it?
IBM put themselves in to a no win situation.
Were I IBM, I would have done things slightly differently. I would have marketed this by saying that they were putting a quantum computer up on their cloud and are granted a select few access if they can show that they deserve access. Just being honest and up front about it... Sign up, make a case and if we (IBM) think you have merit, we'll grant you access.... I get it and I think most sane normal rational people would get it.
But then again, we're talking about IBM Marketing which haven't a clue about how to have a mature conversation where they aren't trying to sell you something.
THIS IS WHY IBM IS STILL STRUGGLING TO TURN THEIR SHIP AROUND AND ARE FLAILING IN THE BIG DATA ANALYTICS AREANA.
But hey! What do I know... I'm just a commentard who's flaming both IBM's stupid as usual marketeers and of course the lazy El Reg reporting...
Moi grumpy? Hardly.
You start off ok and then go off on a rant how this isn't a cloud sort of thing.
Or how you go to sign up only to find out that they've hid their qualifier page to make sure you really are interested in advancing quantum computing.
Lets face it, you may not make the grade. Moi? I know a guy who knows a guy... ;-)
"So put yourself in IBM's shoes. How do they market this play toy and yet limit access to those who would actually do something of value with it?"
Mmm, Honesty? "We have a great new toy, but limited access, sign up now to get on the list for a chance to play with it if we approve you.
Which, BTW, is exactly what they are offering, once the buzzword bullshit is eliminated.
Pity. If they'd been honest, they could have cooked up a lot of "exclusivity" hype over it, and had academics vying for the bragging rights of using it.
When it comes to cloud computing the very worst thing you can do is go multinational, that must be avoided at all costs. You definitely want to go with a local provider, because that is the only way you can secure and protect your privacy.
Going with a multinational guarantees they will invade you business secrets and use them to their advantage
Please repeat after me...
The Cloud is NOT the answer to life, the Universe and Everything.
Sure, it a solution we have available at the moment but without the sort of research the IBM is doing we will be stuck with it forever and a day. slag off IBM all you like (and they do deserve most of it), research like this does not come cheap but it could be the forerunner of the systems we will all use in the future.
Given the other article on 'Monster Cloud' that was published today, do you really want everything in the world to run on a cloud and one provided outsode your company?
FWIW I don't want scientific research to stop. If IBM had described this as I laid out at the start of the article, without the cloud bollocks, it would be all good. Nice one, Big Blue.
Instead it turned into a big kick in the balls.
C.
The IBM invented VM tech in 1966 and took it commercial in 1972 ... one year after Unix got born on an anemic DEC PDP.
IBM has always led the way in technology that eventually trickles down to the desktop ... multiprocessing, high speed interconnect, the disk drive, using separated processors for APP code and I/O channels and devices ... better check the patent database ...
The reason this "new shiny stuff" is available to us LOW LIFES on the desktop is because IBM's PATENT EXPIRED ON IT.
Yep, they likely have noticed the bad cabling. I wonder if that is a symptom of IBM tasting their own medicine: imagine if cabling is managed by an IBM service division via an outsourcing contract whose actual hands on technicians are in turn subcontracted three levels down (Dllbert style) and there's currently a contractual dispute between the first and second levels. Once that is sorted out, in a matter of months someone will fix the cabling mess. Assuming of course that the contract is not over. In that case a renegotiation will start and all the paperwork for the service request will have to be redone again, complete with the associated overhead costs.
In the meantime, IBM's own lab technicians will have sorted it out, even if it was not part of their duties. But there was no choice: either fix it by some means or delay essential research activities. Which of course, will void the IBM service SLAs, carefully crafted by skilled IBM lawyers to say that if someone outside the contractor manipulates anything, then the SLAs are no longer applicable.
This is the sort of nightmare IBM's customers are used to deal with, so they only deserve to suffer it themselves.
Quantum cloud computing is simple.
You can either know the location of the computer or its performance.
The less knowledge you have of the position, the greater freedom in performance.
In the cloud you have no idea where the computer is - and therefore the potential performance is huge
The author rant is a bit funny, since in marketing lingo "the Cloud" is nothing more than "the Internet".
Actually they started to call it "the Cloud" because that's the way "the Internet" has been always represented in most tech diagrams.... and thereby the same silly name was applied to on-demand computing resources.
Without ever understanding that that cloud represented only all the Internet plumbing you were not really interested on... IT got a bad direction when marketing people saw a new way to make money.
Pretty much anything IBM has announced in my IT lifetime has required immersion in liquid helium to work as advertised. Talking about that aspect of any new IBM service or thing is, I suspect, redundant.
Perhaps immersion in liquid helium of the marketing staff would be in order, though.
None of the really cool stuff is, though.
Because, you know, liquid helium.
I vivdly remember the announcement of the affordable CD drive being trumped by IBM who said they had one that could store data at seven times the density of that one's capacity, so yah boo sux.
Downside? Liquid helium or didn't work at all.
First... it's IBM's system. They can let in whomever they want. They aren't a government system running on taxpayer money.
Second... I got in. No hassle, no fuss. 20 minute wait.
Third... if you get in, you can see why they want to limit it to people who have a clue. This isn't a system for an average computer nerd wannabee.
Fourth... it likely isn't set up with load balancing applications with a capacity for thousands of people to be on at one time.
Get a grip on yourself. The fact IBM is setting this up for people all over the world to set up experiments shows they DO GET THE CLOUD.
This article proves the author doesn't get the cloud, and is likely clueless when it comes to security and resources.
This post has been deleted by its author
Because it's YOU that got it wrong. The "cloud" is a remote bunch of compute that must be accessible to more than one entity at a time, or a single task at a time. There's where you go off track and fail to grok this simple accept; IBM has put up a single-use system, on the regular Internet, remotely accessible, but lacking any other cloudy finery; it's not distributed, so only one developer at a time is getting to touch it. That's not a fucking cloud, that's a remotely connected, single host. It's a far from being a cloud as you can get before you just unplug it and call it a DESKTOP. Savvy? Probably not.
Get back to fixing that Exchange Server, I smell it backing up with loads of peoples personal pr0n files... off you go.
The IBM press release is quite clear. "..access through a first-of-a-kind quantum computing platform delivered via the IBM Cloud".
So, the quantum computer itself is not part of a cloud, the means of getting access to it and creating jobs is. The access will be via a SoftLayer application running within the "IBM Cloud". Note the qualification. It's not "The Cloud", it's the "IBM Cloud". So it is whatever IBM defines is the "IBM Cloud", and given the wide scope of most people's definition of what cloud computing is all about (PaaS, IaaS, SaaS etc.), they've neither lied, nor have they misunderstood cloud computing.
The release also talks about a 5 qbit system, and then about being able to use individual qbits. This potentially means that up to 5 jobs may be running at the same time, and if the cloud access platform allows jobs to be queued up in some form of batch system (I don't know, but I would set it up that way myself), then many, many people could be using the access platform at the same time. I very much doubt you get a command prompt directly on the quantum computer itself (I'd love to see the source code of the OS if you could!)
Whether it's misleading is a very subjective matter, and will be based entirely on whatever definition of cloud computing the reader wishes to believe.
Me, I subscribe to Cloud as being "someone elses computer", as stated by an AC at the beginning of the comment thread, so this fits that definition.
Sometimes marketing will publish a press release that sounds too good to be true and in the process set unrealistic expectations and ruin the public's perception of a product which is actually pretty good.
IBM gave me access to the IBM Quantum Experience and I have been playing with it for the past few days. For what it was originally intended, a experimental educational toy for students and researchers, it is quite good. The tool includes a good built-in tutorial that explains the basics of quantum computing, a composer that allows one to configure quantum gates, a simulator, and finally, the ability to run the problem on the actual quantum processor. The tool includes a nice graphic interface that makes creating a configuration a drag-and-drop exercise and a capability to save and display results in an easy to use manner. For those of you interested, I have posted a "First Look" review and you can view it at: http://quantumcomputingreport.com/our-take/ibm-quantum-experience-first-looks/.
There is a lot of hype associated wtih quantum computing these days and it is easy for the general media who do not understand quantum computing technology to blow a development way out of proportion. Many of these folks would not recognize a qubit even if they entangled with one in a dark alley. This has certainly happened in this case and this is not good for IBM given the general concerns for the company that the strategic imperative technologies are not increasing in revenue as fast as the legacy technologies are declining.
- Doug
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