Quantum computing vendor D-Wave announced the launch in the AWS Marketplace to offer its Leap quantum cloud service, quantum proof-of-concept, and quantum feature selection for machine learning (ML). The company hopes to lower the bar and make it simpler for organizations to adopt quantum computing services while ushering in new innovations, applications, and use cases.

D-Wave claims it’s the first and only pure-play quantum computing vendor to list its services in the AWS Marketplace. In addition to simplifying the purchase and consumption process, the vendor also hopes this move will take quantum computing another step toward the mainstream and accelerate its adoption.

Quantum computing is a resource for complex business challenges and for organizations who have pressure to get more business outcomes with smaller teams, Murray Thom, VP of product management at D-Wave, told SDxCentral. “Providing this access to AWS Marketplace and this full suite of solutions in quantum-computing-as-a-service is really about just allowing very small teams to have a really big impact on the organization and have a transformative impact on some of the complex problems that their companies are facing.”

It “means that they're getting the benefit of quantum processing units (QPUs), CPUs, and GPUs. They're getting the benefit of having all the development operations to spin up those resources and relax and back down based on demand as they're using it,” Thom said. “That's an important development operations test.”

Users can take advantage of a variety of different heuristic algorithms, as well as parameter tuning and analysis to get the best results at the application scale. The quantum cloud service available in the AWS Marketplace makes it easier for teams to build a lightweight demo and show it to their organizations, he added.

D-Wave’s quantum proof-of-concept and quantum feature selection for ML is already available in the AWS Marketplace and the company plans to list its Leap quantum cloud service in early November.

The Leap service offers access to the vendor’s quantum computers and a quantum-classical hybrid solver service which D-Wave claims can handle problems with up to one million variables and 100,000 constraints.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) also offers remote access to quantum computers via its Amazon Braket program. Now, Bracket users will be directed to AWS Marketplace if they want to access the D-Wave system.

“I see it as an expansion of the resources that are available to them, and also through a really simple and straightforward mechanism,” Thom said.

The services D-Wave offers now are based on annealing quantum computing and classical computing. The vendor is also working on building gate-model quantum computers like Google, IBM and others currently offer.

Quantum annealing is an optimization process using quantum fluctuations and the computer seeks to find the best solution, while gate-model quantum computers require problems to be expressed in terms of quantum gates.

D-Wave claims its fifth-generation Advantage annealing quantum computer features more than 5,000 qubits. And the company defined five phases for its gate-model development starting with validating the qubit design in its multi-layer stack, according to Thom.

He explained that gate-model quantum computers allow storing more information for applications such as quantum chemistry, solving differential equations, and Shor’s algorithm; while the annealing enables moving between solutions quickly for optimization, scheduling, as well as risk calculation and portfolio optimization applications in life sciences and financial services.

“Those two technologies are maturing at very different rates. The gate-model systems have a lot of engineering challenges in building them, and annealing systems are very well developed and supporting production applications,” Thom said, adding that the gate-model is more powerful but fragile.

D-Wave learned that portions of the total addressable market are available to different models, and the company aims to be the provider of full quantum use cases combining annealing and gate-model quantum computing and classical computing, according to Thom.