AWS launches Amazon Braket to help customers explore and design quantum algorithms

Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, announced the general availability of Amazon Braket, a fully managed AWS service that provides a development environment to help customers explore and design quantum algorithms.

Customers can use Amazon Braket to test and troubleshoot quantum algorithms on simulated quantum computers running on computing resources in AWS to help them verify their implementation.

When ready, customers can use Amazon Braket to run their quantum algorithms on their choice of quantum processors based on different technologies, including systems from D-Wave, IonQ, and Rigetti. Both simulated and quantum hardware jobs are managed through a unified development experience, and customers pay only for the compute resources used.

Quantum computing has the potential to solve computational problems that are beyond the reach of classical computers by harnessing the laws of quantum mechanics to build more powerful tools for processing information.

It has the potential to lead to new scientific discoveries that could transform energy storage, chemical engineering, drug discovery, financial portfolio optimization, machine learning, and much more.

Today, making meaningful advances in quantum computing requires organizations to develop in-house expertise and seek out access to limited quantum hardware.

Researchers who are interested in experimenting across a range of quantum hardware and technologies need to setup and manage the necessary infrastructure, negotiate access with multiple vendors, and write custom code to interface with different quantum processors.

Having access to quantum hardware and managed infrastructure would help enterprises evaluate how quantum computing may eventually impact their businesses so they can begin to build the necessary skills to explore new opportunities.

Managed quantum infrastructure from a range of hardware providers would also help facilitate research and education in quantum technologies that may accelerate new breakthroughs and the quantum computers of the future.

Amazon Braket helps overcome these challenges by enabling developers and researchers in academia and industry to explore and evaluate quantum computing using the same, consistent experience AWS offers its customers today.

Amazon Braket lets customers get started quickly, using familiar tools like Jupyter notebooks to access pre-installed developer tools that can be used to design quantum algorithms, visualize results, and collaborate with others.

Amazon Braket offers cross-platform developer tools that let customers design their own quantum algorithms or choose from a growing library of pre-built algorithms, providing a consistent experience so that customers no longer need to learn multiple development environments.

Customers can run, test, and troubleshoot their algorithms on quantum computer simulators that use Amazon EC2 computing resources. When ready, customers can then run their algorithm on the quantum computer of their choice without having to engage multiple providers or committing to a single technology.

Amazon Braket customers can choose superconducting quantum annealers from D-Wave, trapped ion processors from IonQ, or superconducting quantum processors from Rigetti.

In addition to running quantum algorithms, customers can also use Amazon Braket to run hybrid algorithms, where the combined use of quantum and classical computing systems can help overcome the limitations that are inherent in today’s quantum technology.

“As we see quantum computing technologies make more meaningful progress, thousands of customers are asking for ways to experiment with quantum computers to explore the technology’s potential and contribute to its development,” said Bill Vass, Vice President, Technology, at AWS.

“The cloud will be the main way that customers access quantum computers and combine those systems with high-performance classical computing for certain types of computationally-intensive research.

“Amazon Braket makes it easy for organizations to begin experimenting with quantum computing today—from those just beginning to explore the possibilities to those that are already familiar with different quantum technologies and are ready to use it as a research tool.

“Our goal for Amazon Braket is to be a catalyst for innovation across the quantum community, bringing together hardware and software developers, researchers, and end users.”

Amazon Braket is available today in US East (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), and US West (Oregon) AWS Regions, with more regions planned for the future.

The Fidelity Center for Applied Technology (FCAT) is a catalyst for breakthrough ideas, contributing to a successful future for Fidelity and its customers. FCAT teams track emerging social and tech trends, test product concepts and ideas, and build scalable solutions that support more efficient operations and enhance customer satisfaction.

“Amazon Braket enables FCAT to develop hardware-agnostic software so we can easily switch to new quantum systems as they become available. We’re able to research the strengths of different quantum backends, build hybrid classical-to-quantum, and quantum-to-quantum workflows,” said Adam Schouela, Head of Emerging Technology at the Fidelity Center for Applied Technology.

“FCAT worked with Amazon’s Quantum Solutions Lab to create proofs-of-concept that push the boundaries of what is possible today with cloud-based quantum computers for the financial sector, as part of our broader efforts to be able to quickly deliver innovative solutions to help meet the rapidly evolving needs of our customers.”

Volkswagen Group is one of the world’s largest producers of passenger cars and Europe’s largest automaker. “At Volkswagen, we want to gain in-depth understanding of the meaningful use of quantum computing in a corporate environment. The key will be the testing and continuous further development of algorithms on various quantum computers,” said Florian Neukart, Director Advanced Technologies and IT Strategy, Volkswagen Group of America.

“For the first time, Amazon Braket makes it possible to address and use quantum computers of different service providers via a standardized programming interface. This offers considerable opportunities for accelerating development work and improving our quantum algorithms. We are convinced that Amazon Braket can help deliver the benefits of quantum computing to society and industry even faster.”

Enel is a multinational power company and a leading integrated player in the global power, gas and renewables markets. It is present in over 30 countries worldwide, producing energy with over 88 GW of managed capacity.

“Enel distributes electricity through a network of over 2.2 million kilometers and with around 74 million business and household end users worldwide. Because of our wide service network, the ability to optimize our resource planning is an essential component of digital transformation, and one that we can turn into a concrete advantage,” said Fabio Veronese, Head of Infrastructure & Networks Digital Hub, Enel S.p.A.

“During a collaboration with DATA Reply and AWS, we have tested innovative techniques to perform optimization using Amazon EC2 resources, as well as today’s quantum computers through Amazon Braket. These techniques are promising, and we expect they will lead to solutions that can deliver savings to our operations, especially over time as quantum hardware matures.”

Amgen is one of the world’s leading biotechnology companies, with a presence in approximately 100 countries. The firm focuses on the discovery, development, and manufacturing of innovative medicines.

“Quantum computing has the potential to outperform existing computational methods when it comes to important questions in drug discovery. In fact, the computational demand of running accurate quantum calculations scales quickly out of reach for classical computers as the size of the molecular system in our research increases, and we must resort to approximations that sacrifice accuracy for efficiency,” according to Yax Sun, Director and Narbe Mardirossian, Scientist, at Amgen.

“By collaborating with the Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab and QSimulate, we’ve been able to quickly build and test a cloud-based approach using multiple compute resources on AWS for a critical drug discovery process–a process we plan to transition to a quantum computer in the future when it is practical. Looking ahead, Amazon Braket has the potential to substantially benefit the research and scientific community by providing on-demand access to quantum computing technologies and accelerate innovation in biotechnology.”

The Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC) is a world-leading quantum institute at the University of Waterloo. IQC is advancing the field of quantum information at the highest international level to discover and develop powerful new quantum technologies that will drive future economies.

“While it’s hard to predict which products and sectors will be disrupted the most by quantum computation, or when the disruptions will happen, there is great risk in being caught off-guard and great opportunity in managing the uncertainties wisely. The wise path involves continually exploring where the algorithmic advantages may lie and being ready to run on whichever quantum computer offers the resources needed to achieve the advantage,” said Michele Mosca, Full Professor at the University of Waterloo.

“A quantum computing service, like Amazon Braket, that offers ready access to multiple hardware devices enables quantum readiness and agility.”

Rahko is a London-based quantum machine learning company that is focused on chemical simulation for drugs, batteries, advanced materials and chemicals. “Quantum computing is enabling us to support customers to advance development in areas such as drug discovery and development, battery tech, and material science,” said Miriam Cha, Chief Operating Officer, Rahko.

“Working with Amazon Braket and with the support from the Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab, the Rahko-led consortium with Johnson Matthey, King’s College London, and the National Physical Laboratory, was awarded an Innovate UK Grant for Quantifi, a project focused on bringing near-term quantum computing capability to material science. The ability to model materials at the quantum level will allow us to pave the way for significant advance across many critical research areas.”

Qu & Co supports organizations’ in-house discovery and optimization activities by developing novel quantum-computational chemistry methods and integrating those with customers’ existing computational-chemistry and material-science workflows.

“We are focused on delivering practical quantum-computational approaches for our clients’ most challenging computational workflows,” said Benno Broer, CEO of Qu & Co. “For this purpose, we evaluated different quantum software development platforms. Our experience developing our novel algorithms for quantum machine learning and computational chemistry with the new Amazon Braket service has been very positive.

“Amazon Braket promises a solid integration between classical and quantum hardware, and gives us a hardware-agnostic development environment, classical simulators, and access to different quantum computers. From that same AWS cloud environment, we can apply tools such as Amazon SageMaker to innovate on behalf of our customers.”

D-Wave Systems is a leader in the development and delivery of quantum computing systems, software and services and is the world’s first commercial supplier of quantum computers. Its mission is to unlock the power of quantum computing for the world.

“We share the goal with AWS to explore the practical, real-world applications that deliver customer value,” said Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave. “And as a systems partner of Amazon Braket, we expect that its general availability will continue to drive the growth of the developer community and fuel innovations of pragmatic solutions in quantum computing.”

IonQ, a leader in universal quantum computing, takes a trapped-ion approach to quantum computing that frame its process around nature, using identical individual atoms that act as the building blocks for quantum processing units.

“With the general availability of Amazon Braket, our quantum computers will be commercially available to the public for the first time,” said Peter Chapman, President and CEO of IonQ.

“Our trapped-ion technology is backed by decades of scientific progress, and we are excited that more customers than ever can access our ion-based computers through AWS to scale their use of this technology.”

Rigetti builds superconducting quantum computing systems and delivers access to them over the cloud. Rigetti systems are optimized for integration with existing computing infrastructure and tailored to support the development of practical software and applications.

“Building useful quantum applications benefits from state-of-the-art access to quantum hardware,” said Chad Rigetti, founder and CEO of Rigetti Computing.

“AWS customers can now access our most advanced processor to date, Aspen-8, based on our 32-qubit node technology. By delivering access to our systems in collaboration with AWS we will be able to reach more customers and help accelerate the growth of this emerging industry.”