The Azure Quantum initiative is now in full force! Microsoft announced this at Ignite 2019, highlighting how partners like 1QBit, Honeywell, IonQ, and QCI will help it achieve its quantum dreams.
As noted, this next step in delivering quantum impact has been named Azure Quantum.
And it is a full-stack, open cloud ecosystem designed to bring the benefits of quantum computing to people and organizations around the planet. Developers get access to Q# and QDK resources to get started, along with quantum simulations on classical computers via the Quantum Development Kit.
Which has already raked up more than 200,000 downloads.
To help with all this, Honeywell is bringing its trapped ion quantum computing hardware to the Azure cloud platform. This, the company hopes, will usher in an evolution from the age of quantum coprocessors to an ultimate era of quantum supremacy.
Although Microsoft has been, for a long time, developing its own quantum circuitry, this partnership offers the company access to the trapped ions technology that Honeywell has mastered.
An ion, in this case, being an atom that has a net positive or negative electrical charge. The trap could be a fabricated device, like a computer chip, that can be used to manipulate those ions. The whole process is not too dissimilar to moving electrons through the gates made up of silicon transistors.
This, it is said, adds up to a more reliable quantum device than other approaches.
Getting back to Microsoft, the company lists all its current efforts in this field in the blog post above.
Worth a scan for those of you interested.
