A startup called QC Ware is trying to carve out a role for itself as a “quantum computing-as-a-service” company with the beta launch of its Forge cloud service today.

Quantum computing is a fundamentally different and vastly more powerful computer architecture that has the potential to solve extremely complex problems that are impossible or would take years for today’s classical computers to tackle.

Now, QC Ware appears to have spotted an opportunity in what is an increasingly crowded and fragmented quantum computing landscape. Multiple firms including Google LLC, IBM Corp., D-Wave Systems Inc. and Rigetti Computing have all made different commercial and open-source quantum simulators and hardware available for researchers to use. QC Ware reckons there might be a need for a middleman who can provide simple access to those services.

The Forge platform is targeted at enterprises and academics and provides them with an easy way to access a variety of quantum hardware platforms and simulators to run their algorithms on. QC Ware says it makes these services dead easy to use – so much so that users don’t even need to have any previous experience with quantum computing to get started. It’s safe to assume that some knowledge would still be helpful, though.

With Forge, developers will be able to run algorithms for tasks such as binary optimization, chemistry simulation and machine learning, among others.

Quantum computing is still in its infancy, but QC Ware Chief Executive Officer Matt Johnson said the technology will advance much more quickly if researchers become more engaged in quantum computing application discovery.

“The objective of Forge is to allow those users to access the full range of quantum computing resources through a single platform,” Johnson said. “To assist our customers in that exploration, we are spending all of our cycles working on ways to squeeze as much power as possible out of near-term quantum computers, and to bake those methods into Forge.”

Forge currently provides access to D-Wave’s latest quantum annealing hardware via the cloud, as well as simulators running on Google and IBM cloud infrastructure. In the future, it also intends to enable access to IBM’s latest quantum computing hardware, as well as hardware and simulators from Rigetti Computing.

Quantum computing is advancing rapidly as providers such as D-Wave, Google and IBM all inch closer towards achieving “quantum superiority” and begin tying the new technology into traditional enterprise applications, said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. But now, with QC Ware’s offering, what we’re seeing is the first kind of abstraction services that enable different quantum loads to be run across different quantum platforms, and this is very important, he said.

“This is of high interest to enterprises as CxO do not know who the winners in the quantum race will be,” Mueller said. “At the same time they also want to avoid lock-in, and so any platform that allows them to run multi-quantum-platform workloads for their next generation applications will be very welcome. We are likely going to see a similar demand for multiple quantum platforms in future, just as we have a need for multiple cloud platforms today.”

QC Ware is offering beta testers 30 days of free access to the Forge platform with one minute of actual quantum computing time.

Image: QC Ware