Google recently claimed to have attained “quantum supremacy” and now Amazon’s Cloud arm Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced a new service that will help scientists, researchers and developers to begin experimenting with computers from multiple quantum hardware providers in a single place.
AWS has announced a service named “Amazon Braket” which is designed to let users get hands-on experience with qubits and quantum circuits. Talking about it, Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist at AWS said: “You can build and test your circuits in a simulated environment and then run them on an actual quantum computer. Amazon Braket is a fully managed AWS service, with security & encryption baked in at each level.”
The company also announced an “AWS Center for Quantum Computing” adjacent to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) that will bring together the world’s leading quantum computing researchers and engineers in order to accelerate development of quantum computing hardware and software.
The service makes quantum computers available through the cloud, allowing developers and researchers to play around with qubits and quantum circuits, and to test quantum algorithms in a simulated environment.
Using this new service, users can build their own algorithms from scratch, or work with a set of pre-built ones. Everything is accessed through a single interface.
The computers of the future, based on quantum bits, will not use classical bits but “qubits” which are not limited to binary and can have properties of 0 and 1 simultaneously. It thus tries every possible number and sequence simultaneously to unlock vast amounts of data. The current bits in computers store information as either a 1 or 0 which limits the potential when faced with gigantic volumes of data.
Apart from Google, Microsoft had launched a similar service named Azure Quantum last month, while IBM’s Q Experience is already well established.
