Meity, AWS to set up Quantum Computing Applications Lab in India

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) on Tuesday announced it will establish a Quantum Computing Applications Lab in India, in collaboration with the Amazon Web Services (AWS). The lab is being set to accelerate quantum computing-led research and development and enable new scientific discoveries.

MeitY said that the Quantum Computing Applications Lab will provide quantum computing as a service to government ministries and departments, researchers, scientists, academia, and developers, to enable advances in areas such as manufacturing, healthcare, agriculture, and aerospace engineering. AWS will provide hosting with technical and programmatic support for the Lab.

The government body said that the Quantum Computing Applications Lab will work with subject matter experts from the government sector to define the problem statements, and make them public, inviting applications from researchers, academia, and organizations to address them. It will then provide select applicants with access to quantum computing hardware, simulators, and programming tools, on-demand and at no cost, via Amazon Braket that enables scientists and developers to build algorithms, conduct advanced simulations, and run experiments.

To give you some details, Amazon Braket provides a development environment to enable users to explore and design quantum algorithms, test and troubleshoot them on simulated quantum computers, and run them on different quantum hardware technologies.

“Today, we are delighted to take another significant step in India’s science and technology journey with the establishment of the MeitY Quantum Computing Applications Lab with the support of AWS,” said Ajay Sawhney, Secretary, MeitY.

“We congratulate MeitY for its visionary leadership as it empowers the scientific community in India...By supporting the MeitY Quantum Computing Applications Lab, we aim to make quantum computing available to more scientists, researchers, developers and organisations, enabling them to access and experiment with the technology, and explore the practical applications of quantum algorithms,” said Max Peterson, Vice President, International Sales, Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services.