Running an operating system on a Quantum Computer?
Once quantum computers have matured enough that they can be used for more general-purpose tasks, how long do you think it would take to port an entire operating system to run on quantum hardware? For example, using Ubuntu, or perhaps even running a Windows Virtual Machine on a quantum computer?
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An operating system (as we currently define it) exists to manage multiple resources. A quantum computer generally has one primary resource -- its state. Therefore, an operating system is not really something to be run on a quantum computer.
That said, there are many fun things one could try to implement on a quantum computer, though they might not necessarily be practical.
This is a really difficult question, since the way problems are solved on a classical computer is quite different to the way they are solved on a QPU.
Also, the way data is represented in the QPU is quite different to the classical computer, and the kinds of problems that would be beneficial to solve on the QPU are quite different from those that the classical computer would be good for.
At this point it might be necessary to rethink the coding paradigm and how we want to arrange all of the parts, and for that matter, what parts there are or that we might be concerned with.
A good way of looking at this is thinking about the difference between synchronous and asynchronous code. Synchronous code runs in succession, one instruction at a time, which is how traditional computers work. Asynchronous code runs in parallel, which we have seen more and more of as computers have developed, in the form of multi-core CPUs, and networked computers.
Asynchronous coding comes with its own set of issues, as there is much less coordination between components. The QPU on the other hand, is a lot more coordinated, as qubits are entangled with one another to get simultaneous responses.
Although an operating system run entirely on the QPU does sound interesting, it is a ways off, and what form it might take exactly is unclear at this time.
It seems that most quantum computing platforms are operating under a hybrid approach for the time being, and the forseeable future.
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