Just a few years ago, truly viable and useful quantum computing was the stuff of legends and campfire tales among computer scientists, but development in the last year has led to an explosion of quantum resources available to companies in the cloud. The evolution of the quantum machine has been accelerated by the development of different types of qubits including trapped ion, spin qubits, and superconducting qubits as well as the integration of multiple qubits into faster and more reliable computing systems. The access to such high powered quantum annealing systems is changing the cloud computing landscape for companies like POLARISqb, and that access allows our Tachyon system to perform drug discovery and optimization for protein targets at speeds that can far exceed even the best conventional supercomputers.
The biggest player in the quantum cloud computing industry is Amazon Web Services, who are able to offer access to quantum computers from Rigetti, D-Wave, and IonQ through its multi-layered quantum service, Braket. Braket gives programmers the ability to develop software that is built to run on a quantum platform and test it on multiple different quantum computing architectures. Whether you are utilizing annealing, as our systems do, or want to access a gate structure or trapped ion computer, users have the ability to move relatively seamlessly between systems. In a field that exists at the vanguard of scientific research, this flexibility is an invaluable tool in the pocket of developers.
How do these multiple offerings benefit Amazon Web Services? First, they can attract more users. Also, they are able to use the information on the operations of various quantum systems to better understand the functionalities they provide and the strengths and weaknesses of each system. As they provide users the ability to run multiple iterations of their algorithms at a fairly reasonable price point (both per shot and per task), Amazon Web Services are building institutional knowledge about the ways in which quantum computing solutions can be implemented across industries and in various scientific fields. Amazon looks at providing this service as a kind of starting point or launch pad for quantum computing to be explored by companies like ours, and we are using this launch pad to take off to new heights of in silico drug research and development.
The ability to easily access quantum computing architecture through the cloud is game changing for companies like POLARISqb. The ability to build and test our code on multiple platforms gave us the opportunity to revolutionize the way that drug discovery research is done in a computational environment. As our team of chemists and programmers continues to develop our software and the ability to better understand the relationships of various small molecules with particular protein binding pockets to create new potential drugs to solve myriad diseases that have eluded researchers so far.
