(ComputerWeekly) Microsoft unveiled how it sees quantum computing fitting into its Azure public cloud uring its Build 2020 annual software developers’ conference. The company launched Azure Quantum, which it said would provide early adopters with a scalable path to quantum computing.
The idea is that organisations can begin to build so-called “quantum-inspired” algorithms today, which allow them to start to gain the benefits of quantum computers without needing to use them directly.
A Quantum Developer Kit (QDK) and new language Q# fill out the Microsoft quantum computing portfolio and are available on the open source GitHub repository.
Developing novel quantum algorithms is just the first part of Microsoft’s strategy. The company aims to build out an open ecosystem to solve problems that cannot be run on classical computers. It aims to provide pre-built problem solves and algorithms that can run at an industrial scale.
The trade-off between simulation accuracy and compute-intensity is a major bottleneck in using a computational approach for commercial-size problems.
OTI Lumionics is an example provided in this article of a business beating this bottleneck. OTI Lumionics has been investigating quantum computing as a potential candidate to help accelerate computational chemistry simulations of new materials. Because many structure-property relationships of materials are governed by quantum physics, quantum computing, which uses quantum mechanical effects to perform computations, is a natural candidate to simulate these systems more accurately.