Amazon Braket Direct program to help reserve quantum computers

At its ongoing re:Invent 2023 conference, AWS on Monday announced a new program, dubbed Amazon Braket Direct to offer researchers direct, private access to quantum computers.

The program is part of AWS’ managed quantum computing service, named Amazon Braket, which was introduced in 2020. 

Amazon Bracket Direct allows researchers across enterprises to get private access to the full capacity of various quantum processing units (QPUs) without any wait time and also provides the option to receive expert guidance for their workloads from AWS’ team of quantum computing specialists, AWS said.

Currently, the Direct program supports the reservation of IonQ Aria, QuEra Aquila, and Rigetti Aspen-M-3 quantum computers.

The IonQ is priced at $7,000 per hour and the QuEra Aquila is priced at $2,500 per hour. The Aspen-M-3 is priced slightly higher at $3,000 per hour.

While reservations can be canceled up to 48 hours in advance at no charge, the expert advice offerings are billed separately from Braket, the company said, adding that the prices can be reviewed at the Braket section of the AWS Management Console.

Further, AWS said that researchers subscribing to the program will also get early access to features and devices with limited availability.

As part of Amazon Braket, AWS will provide fully managed Jupyter notebooks, which can be used to build quantum algorithms, share code, test algorithms, and visualize results.

“When you create a notebook in Amazon Braket, it will be hosted and billed by Amazon SageMaker, the AWS machine learning service,” the company said, adding that researchers can choose their preferred instance type to run each notebook and will be billed on a per hour basis.