UK’s National Quantum Technologies Programme: Seeking to Translate Technical Gains into Commercial Opportunity

This Quick Take looks at Amazon's recent announcement of a new EC2 Bare Metal offering that provides users with direct, non-virtualized access to a processor, memory, storage and related networking instance. Amazon uses custom hardware in an effort to wring out the highest possible performance from the basic hardware set up while still offering a full complement of cloud-based software support. This development is a positive one for HPC users looking to migrate workloads to public clouds as Amazon is addressing one of the most vexinghurdles of HPC in the cloud: the performance overhead of running applicationsin a virtualized, performance limiting environment.

This Quick Take looks at the growing availability of commercial cloud-based quantum computing (QC), supported through either direct access to true QC systems or QC simulators based on traditional digital hardware. In addition to QC hardware, most cloud-based QC providers are also rolling out their own software development environments to help existing and new QC software developers more effectively explore QC programming. The choice of options for potential QC users is growing, and each of the QC providers offers a distinct take on QC architecture and programming.