Environmental Technology

City donates 500 decommissioned computers to be refurbished and provided to Detroit families

• Part of Partnership with human-IT to provide free technology to lower-income Detroit residents to bridge city’s digital divide

DETROIT – Hundreds of City government computers recently replaced for newer models will be completely refurbished and distributed for free to Detroit families in need of technology and access to the Internet, thanks to a partnership between the City and nonprofit human-IT. The donation of more than 500 decommissioned city computers is part of the city’s larger strategy for bridging Detroit’s digital divide through its partners at Connect313.

Half of the computers were delivered today, and the remainder will be delivered in the coming weeks. All 500 computers first will be wiped of any existing and sensitive data. Most will be refurbished to be provided to Detroit families lacking access to technology by human-IT and its community partners. Devices

When Google announced its quantum computer had solved a problem beyond the capability of the most powerful supercomputer, it was a landmark for the industry. But Chinese researchers have now shown they could solve the same problem on a normal supercomputer in just seconds.

The ultimate promise of quantum computing is its ability to carry out certain computational feats far faster than classical machines, or even solve problems that would be essentially impossible to crack using traditional approaches.

The field is still nascent though, and today’s devices are far too small to be put to work on any real-world challenges. But in an effort to prove that the field is making progress, developers of quantum processors have been eager to find problems that may not have much practical use, but can demonstrate the potential speedups their technology is capable of.

Google made a major breakthrough on this front in 2019

Although quantum computing is relatively new and far from mainstream adoption, the hype for this emerging technology is building. If companies hope to capitalize on it, though, they must move past this excitement and look at its specific, practical implications.

Effective implementation of any technology requires understanding what it can do for businesses and the obstacles they may face in using it. The journey begins with asking what quantum computing means for IT professionals as a whole as well as individual teams.

What is quantum computing?

Quantum computing operates on the quantum principles of superposition and entanglement. Whereas classical computers calculate with transistors representing either 1 or 0, quantum machines use qubits, which can represent both simultaneously. This lets them perform calculations in minutes that would take classical computers millennia to complete.

The superposition of qubits—being both 0 and 1 at once—lets quantum machines weigh far more possibilities simultaneously.

“These models capture the shape, timing and speed of the electrical signals that neurons fire in order to communicate with each other, which is considered the basis of brain function,” said Costas Anastassiou, PhD, a research scientist in the Department of Neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai, and senior author of the study. “This lets us replicate brain activity at the single-cell level.”

The models are the first to combine data sets from different types of laboratory experiments to present a complete picture of the electrical, genetic and biological activity of single neurons. The models can be used

It’s not what you’d expect to find on the 29th floor of a Toronto office building. Instead of cubicles, a complex arrangement of lasers, mirrors and optical fibers run from floor to ceiling, making up the quantum computer called Borealis.

And Borealis recently hit a milestone by solving a colossal math problem.

“If we ran [the problem] on the most powerful supercomputer out there, it would take 9,000 years. For Borealis, it takes less than a second, which is quite incredible,” says Christian Weedbrook, CEO of Xanadu, the company that built Borealis.

Weedbrook said it’s just the third time a quantum computer has tackled something out of reach for an ordinary computer, a scenario called quantum advantage. The first time was by Google in 2019, the second by a team of Chinese researchers in 2020. Xanadu’s achievement was published earlier this summer in the magazine Nature.