QuEra’s Quantum Computer ‘Aquila’ Now Available on Amazon Braket

First Neutral-Atom Quantum Computer Publicly Available on the Cloud‍

QuEra Computing today announced that Aquila, its neutral atom quantum computer, is now available via Amazon Braket, making it the first generally accessible neutral-atom machine. For customers, this presents an opportunity to explore new solutions to  complex problems in high-energy physics, optimization, material sciences and other fields.

“This is a proud day for our entire team and an important milestone on our journey to build scalable high-performance quantum computers,” said Alexander Keesling, CEO of QuEra Computing. “Aquila is now live on Amazon Braket, and provides a powerful and unique platform that advances the state of the art in quantum computation. We look forward to seeing how users from all over the world will utilize this amazing new platform for research and industrial applications.”

Today, Aquila offers users up to 256 qubits, with plans to scale to much higher numbers. Aquila’s design features a unique combination of system size, coherence, and an innovative analog quantum processing mode that provides new degrees of freedom. Furthermore, Aquila offers the added benefit of flexible reconfiguration of its qubit positioning, a feature that is comparable to designing a new chip layout for each computation. The hardware is complemented by Bloqade, an open-source software package that assists with expressing problems in this new way.  

“AWS is deeply focused on bringing our customers choice on Amazon Braket to explore scientific research and software development for quantum computing,” added Simone Severini, director of quantum computing at AWS. “The addition of Aquila brings neutral atom quantum computing capabilities to everyone on Amazon Braket for the first time. QuEra’s offering helps expand the types of applications that can be performed through Amazon Braket and is a valuable addition for customers focused on exploring neutral atom computing.”

QuEra also continues developing large-scale universal fault-tolerant gate-based quantum computers to tackle many problems beyond the capabilities of classical computers. Built upon the same platform, Aquila’s analog operation represents a different approach to quantum computing that opens new possibilities to deliver commercially relevant solutions to complex problems sooner.

“Special purpose analog quantum devices are likely to outperform classical computation for direct simulation of other quantum systems before we realize a fault-tolerant, universal quantum computer,” said Ignacio Cirac, Director and Head of Theory Division, Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics (MPQ). “In the Theory Division of MPQ we are very much looking forward to using the QuEra device on Amazon Braket, which enables our team of researchers to experiment and pursue new ideas in the field of analog quantum simulation.”

Customers may access Aquila directly using their Amazon Braket account. For additional details on QuEra’s unique approach, or to enquire about public training sessions, visit the Aquila page here.

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