Amazon Braket: AWS Announces a New Service

Nazar H.

2019-12-03

On the opening day of the conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, 2019 Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced three initiatives created to take quantum computing to the level of cloud service availability.

Amazon Braket is a new fully-managed service that will enable scientists, researchers and developers to gain experience with computers from quantum equipment providers such as D-Wave, IonQ and Rigetti. This unified development environment can be used to create quantum algorithms, test them on quantum computer simulators, and then on the real hardware of various architectures.

Today’s quantum computers are works of art. You can see some cool pictures.
Here’s the D-Wave 2000Q:

The Rigetti 16Q Aspen-4:

And the IonQ linear ion trap:

Amazon Braket is already available in trial mode.
The new AWS Center for Quantum Computing announced by the company should become a base where specialists from AWS, the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and other academic research institutes will work together on new quantum computing technologies to solve real-world problems.
The latest of the "quantum" announcements is the Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab. Its mission is to connect customers with Amazon's quantum computing experts, its technology and consulting partners. The lab is expected to help identify practical scenarios for quantum computing and accelerate the development of related applications.
“With significant advances in quantum engineering, customers are looking for ways to experiment with quantum computers and explore the potential of this technology,” explained Charlie Bell, AWS Senior Vice President of Computing Services. “We believe that quantum computing will first appear in cloud technology, and that the cloud will be the main way customers access such hardware.”

A little bit about how it works:

Learn
Amazon Braket provides step-by-step guides to help you get started quickly with quantum computing.
Design
To design quantum algorithms, you can use fully managed Jupyter notebooks directly from the Amazon Braket console. Sample notebooks give you access to pre-installed developer tools, example algorithms, and documentation that makes it easy to get started.
Test
Amazon Braket runs simulations as a fully managed service, automatically setting up the required compute instances, running the simulation, publishing results to Amazon S3, and turning off resources when complete.
Run
You can execute your quantum algorithm on your choice of quantum hardware, paying only for the time that you use.
Analyze
After completion, you will be automatically notified and your results will be stored in Amazon S3. AWS Braket publishes event logs and performance metrics such as completion status and execution time to Amazon CloudWatch.