Wednesday, March 27, 2024

AWS launches Amazon Braket to bring quantum computing to the cloud

Quantum computing is one of the most popular industries in the tech world. Google and IBM have been trying to outdo each other for years in this research domain. At the end of October, Google claimed that his supercomputer Sycamore had reached the point of “quantum supremacy,” a position strongly criticized by IBM and Intel.

Amazon is not looking to enter this technological race right now and prefers to position itself as a service provider. Jeff Bezos’ group has announced the launch of “Amazon Bracket,” an online service that allows scientists, researchers, and developers to begin experimenting with computers from multiple quantum hardware providers in a single place. Those interested in a simulation can experiment with qubits and quantum, the units of measurement in a quantum environment, and have calculations performed by a quantum computer.

The online merchant is not building its own quantum computer, though. Amazon has entered into a partnership with D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti for this. These companies already have experience in creating the required hardware. The test environment is fully managed by Amazon itself, via their Amazon Web Service cloud service.

Amazon Braket allows users to design their own quantum algorithms from scratch, or choose from a set of predefined algorithms, in addition to facilitating the development of hybrid algorithms that combine classical and quantum tasks. Business customers of the Amazon Web Services cloud computing offering will be able to remotely access these quantum computers to continue their research.

Braket is not Amazon’s only initiative related to quantum computing. The company announced in parallel, the creation of the “AWS Center for Quantum Computing,” a research laboratory located close to Caltech, the California Institute of Technology. Amazon is also working on designing its own quantum computers.

Amazon certainly does not have the ambition to become the best and wants to fill in another niche with this program. Quantum computers such as those from Google and IBM are a world far away for everyday men and women. To date, no daily application has been found for them. With this project, Amazon is trying to bring quantum computing a little to daily reality.