  Atomic ensembles, comprising clouds of atoms addressed by laser fields,
provide an attractive system for both the storage of quantum information, and
the coherent conversion of quantum information between atomic and optical
degrees of freedom. In a landmark paper, Duan et al. (DLCZ) [1] showed that
atomic ensembles could be used as nodes of a quantum repeater network capable
of sharing pairwise quantum entanglement between systems separated by
arbitrarily large distances. In recent years, a number of promising experiments
have demonstrated key aspects of this proposal [2-7]. Here, we describe a
scheme for full scale quantum computing with atomic ensembles. Our scheme uses
similar methods to those already demonstrated experimentally, and yet has
information processing capabilities far beyond those of a quantum repeater.
