First I heard of these exascale computers was when a Chinese group published[1] a pre-print in which they classically replicated the Google quantum supremacy result in about 300s. The Google team estimated that a supercomputer (Summit) would take 10e3 years to do the task, which apparently really got to the classical HPC community.
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I’m of a similar opinion, but with the note that QCTRL actually makes products that people want. The current state of the art in QC requires that pretty much everyone needs some kind of pulse shaping/noise reduction, which is (some of?) what QCTRL provides. Plus the quantum sensing space benefits greatly from such techniques as well. So even if quantum computing falls into a “quantum winter” it’s likely that quantum sensing will pull through and so QCTRL might survive.
Those other software companies are also competing with the IBMs, Googles, and Rigettis that are also building similar software for the the hardware they’re making.
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The apparatus you’re thinking of is called a dilution refrigerator.
The “tiny pipes” are actually coaxial signal cables carrying RF and DC control signals. These terminate at a “package” which contains the chip on which the superconducting qubits are located.
The disks (we call them plates) are different temperature stages for the refrigerator, with lower stages being colder than upper stages. The last stage has operating temperature ~10-20mK. Then 100 mK, 1K, 3K, 50K and lastly room temperature. Most of the other things on the refrigerator are involved either in signal filtering, thermal anchoring, or thermal isolation. When operational, all of the stages are enclosed in multiple cylindrical thermal shields. The outermost layer is the “vacuum can” which is airtight and allows for the whole thing to operate under internal vacuum.
Edit: This is just one type of quantum computing device. Others, such as trapped ion or neutral atom rigs would look radically different. Larger vacuum enclosures, different ways of performing control/read operations (lasers!), etc.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.14502